In your interviews you said that you had to rebuild the team from the ground up to fix fundamental issues. What did you mean by that and how did you go about it?
Players have built their own internal logic of how the game and strategies work. They are mostly based on their own perceived experiences or intuition. Which means there can be a lot of bias in place; flawed technical approaches or execution; or even disagreement/misunderstanding from person to person. We have experienced too many of these through the entirety of the split and we are unfortunate that players have been struggling a lot to adapt or reshape the way we see and understand the game League of Legends. So we were never truly aligned, nor in a similar belief.
And just like a machine, if the pieces are crooked or not well oiled… the machine just dysfunctions. It can do its job to a certain level, but it won’t reach the benchmark of what it is supposed to perform. And this means it will require a lot of repairing and maintenance… which we ran out of time with for this split.
We tried a lot to implement theory in the team, so that we could speak the same language – get to a similar understanding. But it may have made things more complicated in the end. I think dumbing down that theory and putting it more into practical examples (to compare our games to other top tier games side-by-side) might do a much better job.
You said that the team lacks consistency in its performances. How exactly does that happen? Why did the team look like a completely different team just two days after an outstanding performance?
I would say only a part of it is true. I do think our Day 1 performance was better, but it’s not like we weren’t making similar mistakes to what our performance showed on a Day 2 match. They were less, but still present.
To first tackle the topic of inconsistency from practice: in scrims, teams are usually more aggressive. They play more to the limits. They make more mistakes than in an official game. And I think, as a team, we relied more on those types of mistakes to be able to close out a game, or even be able to find advantages against teams. I think we are very flawed in the sense that our team doesn’t really execute well on creating or forcing the hands of the enemy.
Next on official matches: When playing back-to-back match days, Day 1 performance can influence team dynamics a lot to Day 2. This can both be for better or worse. In our case it was pretty much always worse.
We get overconfident. Some players would go beyond their own tasks they had within the team, because subconsciously they wanted to do more, prove more. Which makes it harder for players that have leading roles, because well… they can’t lead in the same way as they normally would. It floods communication; there will be cognitive overload which makes it harder to have an overview or understand what needs to happen in the moment. And if we also execute poorly on forcing the enemy’s hands… It is just an absolute disaster.
How is the team spending its time off now? How can you keep up motivation during the off-season?
We first have a good break for a couple of weeks to rest and reflect. I for one have to first recover from a COVID infection… I was running around with a 40 degree fever during the super week. And only recently (3 weeks later) I am starting to actually recover.
We had a long and proper retrospective meeting a couple days after we got kicked out of the competition. So we have a lot of material, thoughts, feelings, opinions, to work with. The strongest feeling out of that meeting is that we all want to achieve more. No one wants to be content with the results that we showed in this split. Because it’s an abomination of a result for what this team on paper would be able to achieve. So we will soon start practice again, make sure we get to scrim some EM teams for good practice. Much more individual coaching and a no-bullshit attitude, which I’m curious about the latter. I think this team needs a lot more balls, to be honest.
And motivation… I mean, if you aren’t motivated after this horrendous defeat to actually get better. I think people have chosen the wrong profession. Then it’s better to pursue a different life. Friction is what makes a man. Defeat can make us much stronger than winning can.