Players Editor-In-Chief Alex Kharchenko talked with Team Falcons player Andreas Cr1t-Nielsen after winning ESL One Birmingham 2024 in Dota 2.
Сongrats with the win. What are you feeling right now?
I’m feeling relieved, most of all. I think it was a little bit of a grind for this tournament. We didn't have much practice for pretty much the whole tournament. We had to grow.
Also, we were not super clean at any stage. But yeah, I'm happy that we were able to keep going and getting better with every game we played and every series. Going through the lower bracket was really good for our team as well. I think it was a great experience.
As a practice?
Yeah, just knowing what that feels like to be in the lower bracket and being on elimination multiple times, I think was good for us. So yeah, it was a really good tournament for Falcons.
This roster was formed in November last year, about six months ago. How can you describe the results? It's an amazing win streak for the team.
Unbelievably, honestly.
Were you thinking that you will win so many tournaments when you were signing?
I think everyone was hoping that we were able to contest for titles. The biggest thing that we wanted was to win. But obviously, you never really know how good you're going to be before you start playing.
I think the good thing is we still feel like we have space to grow. We're not peaking. We know that in this tournament, we didn't honestly play our best. We think some teams can easily catch up with us and we have to keep improving. It feels good because we're winning and then we also know that we can be even better.
In the first two games, you started a bit slow. Was a comeback a sort of strategy to return to the game and win?
No, I wouldn't say that. I think they're a very strong team, especially in early games. And they also drafted heroes that are just very lane-centric. I think that was the biggest reason why they ended up having leads on us in both of those games. We did a good job of playing the map and just getting more gold on them. Eventually, their heroes kind of fell off. It was the best thing.
Obviously, we were not in a position we wanted to be in. They had the advantage both in games one and two. I think they had a chance to win both of those games and we were lucky that we pulled it together and we were able to win.
What changed compared to the game with Tundra? You lost to them and then today you just destroyed the BB.
When we played Tundra, there were a lot of different things. First of all, there was not in front of the crowd. They also just dropped down from the upper bracket and this was their first lower bracket game. We learned a lot from playing them the first time.
I think there were some heroes that we didn't respect when we played them the first time. This time around, we didn't give them those heroes and it just made it a lot easier for us to play. So yeah, I think we were pretty confident going against Tundra and then it just worked out well for us. I think we had a good plan.
What's next for Falcons?
Break for a few weeks, maybe a week and a half or something. Then we're going to play another LAN in Bucharest. We will take some time now to just relax a little bit and hopefully, there will be some patch. I think everyone's hoping that there will be some sort of changes that make the competitive scene a little bit of a shake-up in it. So that's what we're looking forward to.
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