MOUZ head coach Dennis sycrone Nielsen gave an interview to Players special correspondent Sofiia Pikhalo after the loss to spirit in the grand final of IEM Cologne 2025 in CS2.
Thank you for today and your performance of the team. How do you feel after this loss of 0-3?
I feel very disappointed. Playing here today, seeing so many MOUZ fans. I really wanted to put on more of a show. Push it to a fourth map, push it to a fifth map. I think they deserve that. I think also it's kind of a flat feeling going out like this. At least for the moment I'm disappointed. Looking at the playoffs as a whole. I think the way we managed to crawl our way back against FURIA. Show some of our resilience again. And us finally beating Vitality was a huge step forward for us. I think that's one of the two big positive things we'll take from the tournament.
Spinx yesterday told us that it's really a step for the confidence, to gain the confidence. Do you think you had the confidence too much to beat spirit? Or were you calmly preparing for them today?
Instantly after the Vitality game, we all spoke about the fact that this is not the one victory we should celebrate. There's work tomorrow, it’s not enough for that.. So I wouldn't say we're overconfident. Maybe on the other side we didn't have enough confidence today. I think that was the key missing point.
What do you think went wrong from your score from 8-4 to the loss on the first map? Because they have a comeback.
On Ancient, that second map.
And Mirage also was bad.
I think Mirage was fairly... I can't remember the match fully, but I think it was closer.
Closer. Second map was 13-11
We're leading 8-4 on the second one.
So what do you think happened there?
Spirit, I think, played one of the best Ancients in the world. Something they did really well is that they sometimes force you to a tough round. They will save their smokes. chopper and donk were both in the smoke underneath. Maybe even the first smoke. And they will keep resmoking you as soon as you try to take further control in either Donut or Cave. We know this coming into the game, so we have to preps the round for it. Either we have to poke out these smokes, or we have to be very explosive and go. In some crucial moments, we didn't catch the timing. We didn't poke it out enough. And they just forced us to a moment where we're always going to the stack. Or we had to go for a smoke and it didn't work out. That combined with not winning any of the pistols was probably the result of Ancient. But I think also spirit plays a super good Ancient.
Do you think that Donk has sometimes lucky moments and a lot of frags because of it? Or he's just so aggressive and some guys may not be aggressive at the same level. So he just peeks them more.
There's nothing lucky about donk. He's a phenom. The consistency he plays, especially in this role, he's an alien in that regard. Of course, when you play against him, you need to make sure that he doesn't get easy multi kills. Spacing is good. The details of utility. When you have that good of a player, it's tough to shut him down. So sometimes he will get that round. It's more important how you react to it.
Because it feels like their whole team is built around his frags. And the strategy to give him space to make these frags.
What will you do next? The next tournament and next your preparation?
For us, we need to talk about our emotions and also some strategic takeaways from this tournament. Cologne usually is the end of the season. Now it's the start of the season. So we need to look at what can we learn from going here. What does the map look like? What steps can we take in our individual roles? Ludwig is standing in front of me. Brollan is our young captain. I think he's going to take some good steps and learnings.The whole team will as well. Next for us is that we go to Hamburg where we have our offices. We will go there tomorrow and we will do another bootcamp. And we will focus on qualifying for the BLAST Bounty tournament in Malta.
I saw Brollan was in a really devastating state. So do you think your work as a coach plus psychologist should do the work? So he's young but he's still learning how to be the team member, the other players are seeking to have some help, have some support.
Yeah, you're right. They're all young. And just in terms of Brollan, he probably has the most responsibility on the team. It is tough also to feel maybe as if you let the team down now. We didn't get too many T rounds. It's tough for anyone. And I think especially him because he's very young in the position. He's been our coach captain now for roughly six months. Maybe even less. So there's a lot of takeaways, a lot of learnings for him to make. Also as a leader and it's something our sports psychologist is working on, something I'm working on. And as long as he keeps an open mind, he has some traits and abilities already as a player that puts him in a super good position. I mean to play a Cologne final when you're 23 and a captain. Imagine if he tunes that in for the next year or two. He could have a long winning career.
I hope so and I wish you good luck and good results in future tournaments. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
