Ph1NNN: "We knew we were going to win"

After taking down the Kangaroos in the consolidation final of the Skyesports Grand Slam 2024, we caught up with Ph1NNN to discuss the in-game atmosphere and team morale following a challenging defeat on the opening map, Nuke, ultimately resulting in a hard-fought 2-1 victory. Here is what he had to say.

Starting with the heavy loss on Nuke. The map before Nuke you had played was yesterday's 13-0. What was the team talk like after Nuke?

The main issue in Nuke was that no one was communicating well. Like, I think I took two pauses in the first half. I was telling the players, guys, we have to talk. They're not doing anything special. They are doing simple A pops with smokes. But there was a clear lack of communication. They were playing basic CS which we were not able to counter. That was the main issue on Nuke. After Nuke, we simply talked to each other about our communication. 90% of our mistakes will be fixed if we fix our comms.

After winning against GRDX, Bhavi said that maybe Anubis is one of your strongest maps is one in the map pool, which probably is the most T-sided map. Yet you guys had a really strong CT side. Did you just think, Bhavi had a good call, or were you just outduelling them?

On the CT side, the players played really well individually. Because on the CT side, the IGL can't do much. We had good setups. Our connector pushes and other attempts also worked.

On Inferno, do you think, it got a little more closer than you guys wanted it to? I think a couple of sloppy rounds maybe, because, you had man advantage, and they turned it around.

On Inferno, we made a good comeback in the first half. Brought it back to 8-4. But I feel like it should have been 9-3 or 10-2. In the second half, we didn't get a good start. But in the buy rounds, we brought back momentum. rev3nnn threw in that 1v4 against yourwombat which hurt the economy. It was 10-8 at that point I think. After that another 1v1, and 2v2s hurt our economy. I think we only threw one or two rounds, the rest was normal.

This was the lower bracket final, on LAN. Were there any nerves?

Yeah. No, I mean, personally, I didn't feel it. I think the rest of the team maybe showed some nerves because when we played Nuke, we could see the player's pressure. They weren't talking, nothing was happening. And, like, we knew we were going to win this game. We were confident we were going to win.

Now in the Grand Final, how confident are you going up against Aurora?

I will pray we win.