FaZe Karrigan at the ELEAGUE Major: Boston: “It was a shaky start for us”

FaZe Clan are victorious once again at the ELEAGUE Major: Boston, and they’ve already met all expectations after their first match.

With Finn “karrigan” Andersen leading Europe’s strongest roster into battle, FaZe swept Mousesports in their first playoff match. Mouz put up a great fight on Nuke, but they fell short as FaZe won 19-16, thanks to many impactful plays from Nikola “NiKo” Kovac and Ladislav “GuardiaN” Kovacs. Then Karrigan and co. finally shut down the Mouz lineup with a convincing win on Cache, which ended at 16-9.

Karrigan sat down with Dot Esports after his team’s quarterfinal 2-0 sweep.

Related: FaZe Clan wrestles past mousesports in the ELEAGUE Major quarter finals

Nuke was a tight map for you, but you managed to win 19-16. Why do you think Nuke was so close?

I think Mousesports are a very on-point team on Nuke, and I think they’ve proven that in the last part of last year when they beat Astralis. We also played them on Nuke at ECS. So we kinda knew it was going to be a tight match. That’s why we wanted Nuke as the first map. If we were not warmed up, we could fix it on Cache. Big respect for Mouz, and I think that they played pretty good on the T side, since they got nine rounds without a pistol [round win]. I think that’s impressive. I’m just glad that we got the pistol and that we could clutch it out in the end, since it was a shaky start for us.

Did you guys prepare anything specific for that Nuke matchup, since you were expecting it?

So we have been preparing Nuke for the tournament, instead of other maps. We have been focused on all our maps. Definitely Cache and Train have been improved, and our Nuke has been a little shaky, but it’s a map that not many teams are willing to pick and play in a best of three. So we have to wait on that. Other than that, we didn’t really prepare. I watched our game against Mouz in ECS Finals, and that was really the only preparation that I had for the match.

With that late comeback from you, thanks to suNny’s suicide and NiKo’s huge one-on-two, how much of an impact do you think that had on Mouz going late into that game?

The break, the CZ buy round that we won at I think 14-13 or 14-12, the next round we won… All these clutches happened, and I think they had a late impact in that regard. It’s hard to say how they deal with situations like that, but we tend to forget and just play the next round.

On Cache, FaZe was playing absolutely fundamental Counter-Strike—playing for map control, etc. How comfortable were you going into each round?

[Our] Cache definitely has two ways of playing: We played very fast, very similar executes, and a very slow style, where I let my players get to their play-making point where I can call around what they do. I changed the pace at 6-1, trying to rush. And that definitely hurt us. And then I realized we can just play the slow game and we can auto-take them and get good positions. So I think that was the key point that I fixed on the T side to have a good half.