Xizt: “I’m expecting a lot from jabbi, he’s a huge talent”

Heroic have kicked off their IEM Road to Rio Europe RMR campaign with a statement victory over SAW, swiftly dispatching of the Portuguese side to go 1-0 up in the Swiss group stage with relative ease.

Casper “⁠cadiaN⁠” Møller‘s side had suffered heartbreak mere days ago when they lost to Natus Vincere in the playoffs of ESL Pro League Season 16, an intense series that saw the first two maps go the distance fizzling out on the decider after an issue caused by a Steam exploit led to a nearly two-hour long delay.

Following their opening win in the RMR, HLTV spoke to Heroic‘s coach Xizt to find out how the team were affected during that pause, and how they spent the last few days in order to bounce back in the RMR. The Swedish veteran also shared his thoughts on how Jakob “⁠jabbi⁠” Nygaard is faring in the team and how role changes have affected Martin “⁠stavn⁠” Lund, who has had a noticeable drop in form in the last three months compared to the first half of the year.

Starting off with the RMR here, a pretty quick and simple win over SAW for you. How are you feeling after getting off on the right foot?

It’s always nice to get a good start at an important qualifier like this. It was a bit shaky at the start, it was 4-3 at some point I think, but then again I think SAW is a pretty underrated team.

We could see in the last RMR, they lost with 0.02 seconds on the bomb timer or something like that. Plus they have rmn and MUTiRiS, who are both very experienced players. I think I played against them at the first CS:GO LAN in 2012, so we didn’t underestimate them, they have a lot of experience, but yeah it feels great to get a win.

How much time did you spend prepping for them? You’ve had a few days since your match in EPL, so has that been spent mostly bootcamping, or did you take some of that time off to reset?

We do as we always do. Luckily we had three or four days to get some practice before this tournament, and then we just did the usual prep that we do the day before a big game. We had a lot of time, which I’m happy with.

It’s been about three months since you added jabbi, how is he slotting in now? Initially you were still getting used to him in the team.

At the start, when we started practicing with jabbi, we could see that he had huge potential. He was playing really good in practice, but then as a team I think we struggled a lot, both in Cologne and then at the BLAST Premier.

I don’t necessarily think it’s because of jabbi that we lost, we just struggled as a team, as a whole, as a unit, but I can definitely see that jabbi is getting more and more comfortable in the team now. He’s been stepping up hugely for us, he has really good impact, and he’s winning really important clutches for us. I’m expecting a lot from jabbi, he’s a huge talent and I’m looking forward to see what more he can deliver.

Has his addition changed many of the roles in the team? I’m wondering how it’s effecting stavn, because in the first half of the year he was probably one of the best riflers in the world but he’s cooled off a fair bit recently.

We didn’t just switch everything between refrezh and jabbi, we also switched some of stavn’s roles, for example, to fit jabbi in better. Luckily, stavn can play any role in the team, even AWPing.

That could have had an effect on stavn’s performance of course, he’s playing some new roles, but I’m not worried about a guy like stavn. He can surely bounce back from a bad performance and he rarely has two bad performances in a row I would say.

I did want to touch on the NAVI series at EPL. It was really close for the first two maps of the series, and then obviously there was a very extended pause. For your team in that series, how much of an effect did that have psychologically, or just in general in terms of how that series played out towards the end?

It obviously effected NAVI a lot more than us because they were the ones getting DDoS’d or whatever, but it was really rough for us. NAVI has a lot more experience than we do, maybe they know how to handle those kind of situations better. They definitely handled it better than us after the pause. s1mple was just destroying us and he was really on point in that last map, which was also hard for us.

Going 1-0 at the start of the RMR after that experience, how much has that helped take the pressure off you?

I would say that even from the EPL group stage, we got a lot of confidence. We won four best-of-threes, which we’ve been struggling with with the new lineup, especially at LAN. Winning the first game here is huge for us to get a good start, the best-of-ones are equally as important as the best-of-threes, you need three wins and now we got one so I’m really happy with it.