Jonathan ELiGE Jablonowski gave an interview to Players special correspondent Alex Kharchenko after the loss to The MongolZ in the quarterfinals of the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025 in CS2.
So it was quite a tight game, two games, two maps. What are the main reasons? Was it stress, pressure from the audience, lack of clutches? What do you think are the main reasons for your loss, unfortunately?
On Mirage I think that our teamplay just kind of broke down. I don't think that we played the rounds out as well as we could have.
That one comes down to our experience as a team, as a five. That was our second match on Mirage with rain and Sasha, which makes it difficult, of course. So that map is kind of just written off.
We started getting better towards the end, but we don't have many rounds to play with. So even if we could have made a comeback on T side, when you don't have that many rounds, it's going to be tough.
And on Anubis, everything was going right, honestly. We didn't win the pistol round, which was kind of unfortunate. And all of our executes didn't go well. They played them well towards the end with good reads, but we also could have done our executes a little bit better.
And I think that's honestly what came down to it, because everything else was going really good.
As you're from the United States, what can you say about this crowd, about Austin and your performance here?
Yeah, the crowd was great. They were really energetic, they were going crazy the whole time. You could feel how passionate they were the entire time, the chants, the energy. I wish we could have shown them more games, but I'm really thankful for the experience and happy that they showed up the way they did.
Playing with s1mple, what did he give you as a team?
He is obviously a great player. He has great macro reads and very vocal. I think it's very easy for me when AWPer telling me everything that they want to do, and I can just play off of that. So if they want to go for whatever pick, just formulate a plan really quickly off of that.
And because we have played together and I know how he likes to play, it really suited in really well. And I think that he has a lot of good micro-comms that he does as well, because he's just very confident in what he sees and what he knows is right. And I think that it helps everyone play more confidently.
Taking into account that karrigan previously said that the future of s1mple is a question mark, and you also answered that you don't know what will happen. Do you want to still play with s1mple in the future, if you have this opportunity?
I would like to. I mean, Sasha is obviously the best CS player of all time, in my opinion.
So playing with him is a no-brainer to me. I think that we can make something special here. Even with a limited amount of practice time, we're still showing what we did here.
We could have done more. So yeah, that's my answer.
And the final question. The teams that left, who are the main teams who can win the Major, from your point of view?
I mean, the main favorite is whoever wins in the bottom bracket. Mouz or Vitality is obviously the favorite to win the whole thing. If Mouz can somehow beat Vitality, who's to say that they won't beat whoever wins between MongolZ and paiN.
So definitely underdogs on the top [of the bracket] but anyone can win. The major crazy things can happen. So yeah, we'll see.