Senpai on XO's future: 'With time, there maybe some changes'

Battling the odds, unranked Middle Eastern team, XO, stunned everyone as they took down renowned teams such as Rare Atom, ATOX and Chinggis Warriors on their way to to the title.

Not only did they beat much higher ranked teams, XO comprehensively outplayed their opponents, dropping just one single map (Ancient to Chinggis Warriors) in the Playoffs.

XO's star player 0SAMAS spoke about being taken by surprise in the Grand Final's opening map and how they turned it around.

Yeah, it’s very hard to recover from an early disadvantage, especially after losing pistol round and anti-eco. Losing these rounds also gives a lot of momentum to the enemy, and eventually you can easily lose a match. We took a timeout, and we talked about every small detail for the next round because we knew that it was very important that we break this momentum that they had built up. What makes us different is? It’s very easy for us to adapt on the fly, and everyone has a unique skill set, and they all give inputs. This makes it hard for the enemies to counter us because there’s not really one way of playing CS. We just keep switching it up.
0SAMAS

On the second map, their own pick of Anubis, things got a little scary towards the end as ATOX threatened to push the map to overtime, before XO eventually closed it at 13-10. 0scar from XO shared his thoughts about the team comms and what was going on in the XO camp.

Yeah, we got really excited once we reached (map point) and well the boys just wanted to lift the trophy. I’m like ‘boys listen, listen!’ And trying to yell out strats but it became so chaotic at the moment and we really couldn’t contain the excitement. We just paused, everyone calmed down and we got the job done finally.
0SCAR

Senpai also shared some insight about the future for XO and whether the players might be receiving offers from other teams etc.

Yeah, I personally will continue with my team but with time there maybe some changes like maybe some of our guys might receive tier 1 offers so I can’t tell them to stay or anything because they might have found something better for them, I’ll feel happy that they’re going to the next level.
Senpai

Finally, before heading off for the celebrations, Dodal spoke about what the win means to the team and how important it is that they are the first Middle Eastern team to win eXTREMESLAND in its nine-year history.

We have many Counter Strike teams in the Middle East, but we don’t have enough tournaments or opportunities to prove ourselves. The scene is very weak. We are trying to enhance it by attending events like this and we just doing this by ourselves because we don’t have any sponsor, we are our own sponsors. Another big challenge, we face is whenever we have a qualifier for a tier 1 event, a lot of regions get mixed and we face a lot of cheaters in these online qualifiers.
Dodal