Heroic were forced to make a run through the lower bracket to make it to the grand final of Pinnacle Cup Championship, but make it they did, besting MIBR, fnatic, Finest and BIG along the way.
Astralis awaited them in the final but they brushed their Danish rivals aside convincingly, taking them down 2-0 and securing the first ever LAN trophy for this lineup, breaking a curse that has plagued them ever since LAN Counter-Strike returned.
sjuush carried his team against BIG in the semi-finals
After finally taking a trophy after endless playoff appearances and top-fours, sjuush took some time with HLTV to talk about the series against Astralis, how much this run means for the team, and his own strong performance.
Congratulations, how important is finally taking a LAN victory for you?
It’s definitely a confidence boost. We wanted a LAN win for a long time now and we’ve been in so many playoffs, top-fours, top-eights as well, play at every single tournament on LAN, so this means a lot to us. We finally break through, break the curse.
Is it hard to stay motivated when you had done so well in the online era, only to have to wait so long for this LAN win?
I think we expected more of ourselves, but we were still pretty happy about our results. If you look back on my career at least, I had never been to a Major, then made top four at my first and top eight the next, at Katowice as well, before that I didn’t even get to playoffs. It has been achievement upon achievement at every single tournament we have played.
We expected more, we expected to win some tournaments, but we still got far and can be proud of that.
This tournament had to be won via a lower bracket run, dropping a best-of-one to fnatic and a map to Finest; is it sweeter to show that resilience, the ability to still come back and win the whole tournament?
We have a pretty good mentality, we don’t give up, we keep high hopes.
In the fnatic game we lost a 1v1 at the end to not take it to overtime, it was the smallest things. The Finest game, they stomped us pretty well on Vertigo, but we came back and we could feel they didn’t have much experience on LAN and were nervous, just how they peeked stuff and reacted. We were pretty comfortable, even though we went to lower bracket instantly.
Does it add that cherry on top, taking the trophy over your rivals Astralis, considering all the history?
Yeah, every single victory over Astralis means something, doesn’t matter if it’s the first game in a tournament or a grand final, it’s still the same.
Speaking about this series, you must have felt confident after seeing the veto? Overpass and Mirage have treated you well this event.
Even against BIG we were surprised they wanted to play Mirage, we are pretty confident on Mirage and are happy about playing it.
I think they were pretty surprised by the Overpass pick, and our Mirage has been insanely good, so we went in with full on confidence. We knew Ancient would be 100% picked by Astralis, it seems to be the only map that works for them, and they are really good on it.
How were you able to take Ancient so convincingly, Astralis are considered one of the best in the world on that map?
We shut them down pretty good, I think it’s because we watched so many demos of them because they are a really good Ancient team, we stole a lot of things from them.
They rely a lot on blame on banana and k0nfig in mid and we shut down the middle, k0nfig didn’t really get much space to do his own things and create space for his team. I think that helped us a lot, they couldn’t really do anything, and we read them pretty good.
How did you feel about your own performance in this event? There was a lot of classic sjuush, stable and reliable, but in the semi-final you really stepped up and topped the scoreboards.
I’m feeling good about it (laughs), of course. I was feeling it in the aim botz you know, in the warmup I was listening to some hardstyle (laughs) just feeling it, shooting the bots. I was pretty confident in every single duel I went into, I didn’t have a feeling that anyone was better than me when I was taking a duel, full on confidence.
Also my plays, sneaking through smokes, and I trust in Casper’s calls, so everything worked perfectly.
