oskar: "Before Nuke, I told myself 'it's now or never'"

MOUZ clinched their first trophy with their new lineup at ESG Tour Mykonos, defeating Liquid 3-2 in the final, improving their CT sides on the maps they won for the title.

oskar's massive performance on Nuke tilted the scales in mousesports' favor

We sat down with one of the winners and the tournament's MVP, Tomáš "⁠oskar⁠" Šťastný, to talk about some of the maps of the grand final and MOUZ goals in the future on the back of the win in Greece:

After you had your CT sides quite up and down this whole tournament, in the maps you won in the final, the CT sides looked very good, was there something you changed for the grand final?

We didn't have much time for practice, only about seven days, so we mostly retouched the Terrorist strategies, there wasn't much time for the CT sides. Here, when we lost to SK, we started looking at some tricks and it's working on some maps. So we worked on them throughout the tournament.

On Mirage, it looked like you were going to come back as Terrorists, where did it go wrong in the end?

We always believe we can come back when we're down a lot, we always believe something can happen and we can win. When we lost the eco in connector, when our guys ran into the smoke 2v4, I knew it was going to be hard. That probably cost us Mirage, if this didn't happen, I think we would have won it.

What about your own performance, the first four maps were quite underwhelming compared to the rest of the tournament, but for the last one you stepped it up...

I didn't feel very well... I knew I was in form, I probably wanted it too much so it didn't work. After that, before Nuke, I went to my room and washed my face, regenerated, and I told myself 'it's now or never, if I'm good, I have to show it now,' and I managed to do it.

On Nuke, chrisJ is AWPing on the CT side, was this your idea, did you not feel good on the map with the AWP?

I never played the primary AWP in 1.6, so I wanted to enjoy playing one map with the M4 and AK-47, so we agreed on it and chrisJ likes to AWP. I'm really happy when we play Nuke, because sometimes I get worn out with the AWP. I really have fun with the M4 on the CT side, play wherever I want and do whatever I want, so it's very freeing.

Now that you've won one tournament, what kind of goals will you set for yourselves for the remainder of 2017?

Of course we want to rise in the rankings, make the top five, maybe three, but it'll be hard. Especially at ELEAGUE, it'll be our goal to go to playoffs. And afterwards, we'll see what happens, if we qualify somewhere again. We still have to practice, we're only at the beginning, this doesn't mean anything, we're all happy of course, but it doesn't.