huNter-: “We need to deal much better with pressure”

The BLAST Premier World Final begins on Wednesday, and among the teams in attendance one of those with the most to prove are G2. After starting well following the additions of Justin “⁠jks⁠” Savage and Rasmus “⁠HooXi⁠” Nielsen, the last few months have gone awry for them, as they missed out on the IEM Rio Major and exited the BLAST Premier Fall Final in the quarter-finals.

The team around Nemanja “⁠huNter-⁠” Kovač now come to the culminating event of 2022 looking to turn the ship around before the scene heads into the winter break, and are getting ready for their first match of Group A against FaZe.

Before their campaign, HLTV spoke to huNter- about expectations for the event and the struggles G2 have faced in the past few months:

We’re headed into a similar event as the BLAST Premier Fall Finals, so what do you expect for G2 here? Not much time has gone by, so what are your expectations at this event?

This event is kind of like a gift for us because I don’t think we deserve to be here after the results we had in the last couple of months. We put in a lot of practice since we lost at the RMR. The last event didn’t go well for us and we lost a close game to Heroic, who won the event. Okay, we lost to the winner, but we’re not thinking like that. We worked a lot, practiced a lot, and we’re just trying to be better than we were during the last couple of months. We’ll try our best, but no expectations, we’re going step by step. We have a game against FaZe tomorrow and we’re just thinking about that.

Are you comfortable here, what’s the pressure like to finish the season strong?

Yeah, we feel comfortable, of course. We can’t put more pressure on ourselves that we had already. We’re playing for G2 so everyone expects results and we have a lot of fans, as well. This is the last event of the season and we need to try our best, do our best, and see how we will finish before we prepare as best we can for the next season.

Looking at past years before COVID, the second half of the year was packed with events. This year it was a long Pro League, the Major and its qualifiers, and two BLAST events. There’s not that much to play or travel to. Do you think that harms teams that make changes in the summer and are not able to play enough, especially those not going deep into tournaments?

I fully agree with you, that affects a lot. As you said, people that made changes, like us, we changed two players and IGL, so we need experience playing officials. We practiced a lot, but it’s not the same feeling playing practices and playing official games. A couple of days ago we said that we needed to play more online events, whatever they are, because you improve the best when you play officials and when you’re at events. It doesn’t matter if it’s LAN, online, but we need more events.

Since the beginning of this season, since August, all eyes were put on the Brazil Major. This is understandable, of course, it’s the first Major in Brazil and there was a lot of hype around it. We didn’t play there and that was our bad, obviously, but I do think we needed more events after changing players to be more together and gain more experience playing together. We didn’t play that much compared to other years.

Especially me, for example, I was playing in Valiance/CR4ZY, and had more than 300 maps on HLTV a year. So of course, comparing it now to 150 or however many I played this year, it’s a big difference. Or HooXi, who was playing for Flames, he had a lot of maps and online events as well. But in the end it’s our bad because as you said, we didn’t go far in any event except Pro League.

G2 beat FaZe in their latest encounter at ESL Pro League in September

This is a season-ending event. What’s coming next for G2, what can we expect of G2 going into the off-season and the new year? Have there been any talks about what will go on after this event?

We’re waiting until this is over, we haven’t talked about anything for next season except when we can expect to bootcamp, so that we can plan our holidays. That’s all, we didn’t talk about anything else, what we should do or how we should do it, we’re just focused on this event for now and then we’ll see.

FaZe have also had their own struggles, but came alive at Fall Final. How do you see that match-up?

FaZe is FaZe. This year for FaZe is the best in their history, so talking about them struggling or whatever, I don’t think they struggle. I think they’re really happy with this year and what they did, and I’m sure they want to finish on a good note so for sure they’ll want to win this event. Our expectations against them… I always like playing them, we always play good games against them, so I’m just looking forward to it. No expectations, we’re just going to play the game and try to win.

Have you figured out what are the things that work and the ones that don’t by now? The positives and negatives you’ve found.

This is the first time that I have a team in which the five players, the coach, and everyone is working a lot. I hope this work will pay off sooner or later because in my career it has always been like that. Every time I worked a lot it paid off sooner or later. So that’s a really positive thing I like about this team. Sometimes it’s even too much, so we should watch out as well.

There’s a lot of positives, the mood and atmosphere in the team is always good and even if we don’t have good results we always try to stay together. There’s not individual, even if they played well, that is just focused on themselves. We win and we lose together, and I really like that. We’re a real team. This is the first time that I don’t know why we have results, and I don’t like to search for excuses, I just don’t know what is happening and we need to be patient. That’s the thing, we just need to focus, be patient, and all of the hard work that we’re doing will pay off.

Regarding the negative things, obviously that’s the results. At the beginning we started well, we qualified for BLAST Fall Final, then we did amazing at the Pro League group stage with 10-0 and we played a good semi-final against Vitality, who won at the end. Then we failed at the RMR really bad and then it was really hard to bounce back after that. We didn’t have that many failures, but we just didn’t play enough to show what we’re capable of. We need to deal much better with pressure, I’d say, that’s negative, and if we manage to do that we’ll be a better team.

I really like this team. They’re good players and good human beings, all of them. I’m just looking forward to playing more to see what the future holds.