Valiance: "I’m proud of the boys, even making the Playoffs was an achievement"

SemperFi were the Oceania representatives at the eXTREMESLAND Asia Open 2024 and put into a tough group with TYLOO and IHC, the Australian-core squad managed to fight the odds and make it out to the Playoffs, where they fell to TYLOO. Post their loss to TYLOO, SemperFi's Valiance had a chat with Dust2 India about the quarter-final performance and journey in Shanghai.

You got off to a strong start on Inferno and had it under wraps until the sides switched. What happened towards the end of the second half?

I think we just lost a lot of opening picks on the CT-side, put us on the back foot in the early rounds. It was kind of hard for us to get back map control after that, honestly they just outplayed us, like we would stack one site and they would hit the other.

What do you think went wrong on Inferno? Do you think the previous result on Inferno, affected your mental game?

Actually we won the CT-side pistol round which we struggled to do in recent games but then again they got the anti-eco and the economy was all over the place and things just spiraled from there. But our mental coming into the map was fine, we referred to a sports psychologist and picked up techniques on how to reset and stuff but yeah, they (JiJieHao) were very sharp.

You guys cleared the Australian qualifiers, took down IHC, ONi and you finished in the top 8, can you talk about your eXTREMESLAND experience?

Well, we’ve all been taken good care of. I’m proud of the boys. Even making the playoffs was an achievement, we had a really hard group and we’ve put in the work for this at our Latvian boot camp, we prepped hard and I think the boys are honestly happy with the results so far. Shout-out to all the fans here at eXTREMESLAND, coming up to us and asking us for signatures and stuff, it’s really good.