Liquid’s Coach GBJames: “I think we can make the finals”

Photo Credits: HLTV.org

We interviewed Liquid’s coach GBJames after his team’s victory over Counter Logic Gaming. Here’s the transcript:

Q: Let’s talk about Map 1. At first, you had a bit of a rough half, but later came back very strongly. What was going wrong in the beginning and what did you to to change that and make such a great comeback?

Coach GBJames: I think the team was actually nervous. I think nervous got to them. That’s not fun to say, but it’s the truth. Being on stage, I could feel it, it wasn’t our normal play. Trying to do too much, too little, in different places, trying to be perfect… it just didn’t work. And then, after we calmed our nerves – and it took a while to do it, until 12-3 – we knew exactly what they were going to do. We game planned for them hard – I think I watched about 40 demos of them – so we overread into what they were doing, and we stacked sites on them, and got sloppy with those extra people. So once we calmed everything down, recollected ourselves, we plowed them.

Q: Tomorrow you will be facing either Virtus.Pro or Luminosity Gaming. How do you think you stack up against these two teams?

Coach GBJames: I’m gonna game plan pretty hard, so I think we’re good. Honestly, I feel great against either. We’ve beaten VP, we’ve beaten the old LG. I know exactly how they play, and I’m going to prepare the team hard for it, so I think it’s going to be a great game.

Q: We’ve seen a very strong performance coming out from you guys: do you think you have what it takes to give NA its first major?

Coach GBJames: I think we can make the finals, I truly believe that. I’ve told the team when we were playing fnatic, I really thought we were going to beat them. I actually predicted it to the team, and I don’t do this often, I predicted it was going to be 16-6. I knew that because we’d beaten them before, and I know this is gonna sound odd… but I knew we were going to out-alpha them, in a sense. They play with such arrogance and such confidence that I knew that if we played our game – and I feel like that’s why they crashed. We were down five rounds or so, and then we just snapped into our game. I reminded the team of a couple things, and we went with it. So yeah, I think we can.

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