ImpressioN: "We would have won their map pick anyway"

After beating ARISE yesterday in a nail-biting thriller, Nemesis SEA were able to qualify for the third-qualifier. After the game, we sat with their most experienced player ImpressioN, to talk about the match. Here is what he had to say:

So ImpressioN, first of all, can you talk about Mirage. I think it's a really strong map for you, but were you caught off-guard on it?

I think Mirage has been just a little bit shaky. I think it comes from probably like experience and our time together as a team. Because we force like a 6 map pool as a fairly new team. So it's been a little bit shaky. So we knew ARISE perma-bans it, but we had no info in how they play it. We didn't really study. And we were caught off-guard by how they play. Like they over-rotated a lot. It's stuff you don't really see with other teams. I felt like we played on the server on the T-side, they were gambling a lot. And having started the game on the T-side of the map, we were caught off-guard. So we didn't exactly play really well. Like early half-of the T-side, Mirage yeah.

Then they tried to play with their map pool a bit by picking Train. Was it surprising?

No, we fully expected them to pick either Train or Inferno. I think they threw a curve-ball picking Train thinking we don't play it. But we do. And we were preparing a lot for Inferno, and if they had picked that as well, we would have won their map pick anyway I think.

On the final map, you were up like 12-6. But ARISE were able to almost pull off a comeback. Why did it take so much effort to close the map?

I think the boys were feeling under pressure a little bit. It's a really big game for us, we really want to play as many games as possible. With how VRS works, winning a game against ARISE meant we played one more ranked game on HLTV. So we were a little bit under pressure when it came to closing the map, but we should have done it a lot cleaner. I think overall it's a good learning experience for us. But either way, no matter what happened, I was confident we could have closed off map Train.

You are up against DEEP CROSS tomorrow. How do you feel going up against them?

I mean we played against them in a South-east Asia Qualifier for seeding in a Bo3. And honestly we didn't do so well. I think we lost to ourselves. They have a little-bit different roster now compared to when we played against them, or maybe it's the same I can't really remember. But yeah, we are going to go in fully confident and play our best game, and play the way we want to play.