Photo: LoL eSports
We catch up with Fnatic's captain Enrique "xPeke" Cedeño after the end of the Singapore group stages, going over the nail-biting face-off against OMG, adding Toyz to their coaching staff and that one victory against Samsung Blue.
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Interview with [A].Nyph
Congratulations on some incredible games today. In the second match against OMG we were all watching how it came down to that last hit on the nexus. What was going through your mind at the time?
That game went pretty bad, we made a lot of bad decisions. After that long game, as we saw a chance to finish it we just went for it. In my mind, it was never going to work but I just saw the Nexus going down and down and then I was like "maybe we can do it, maybe we can do it". It came down to 1 hp and I wanted to cry, it was so close.
We were all feeing that as well, yeah. Going into the match against LMQ, what was your mindset.
We knew that if we won there was still a bit of hope but whether we win or lose it's not up to us so let's just play for fun, play like we did the other day but try not to make mistakes, be confident and not care about the result.
You say play for fun - is it how you de-stress? Does stress affect how you play a lot?
Sometimes yes, especially when you think "what if we lose" and "we're out if we do". That takes away from your focus and even if it's not much - it's different for every player - you have to play as winning or losing matters not and then it's much better.
When you told the team to play for fun... does that explain your Lisandra pick?
The Lisandra pick was more for fun, yes. She's very good against assassins that must go all-in, like Fizz who have to cast all his burst. But Lissandra has ultimate to stop it and your W can stop his Q. So it's perfect - every time he goes in, I can ultimate to freeze him and we can burst him down. It was a fun pick but it was more of a counter-pick as well.
Yeah, I guess it also set up the penta kill for Rekkles in this game. Let's talk about Toyz - you recently added him to the coaching staff. Can you tell us more about that addition?
Right now it's a temporary thing, of course: He's from China, we're from Europe and I don't think he'll want to move. But when we came here we knew it'd be good to have a secondary coach - we already have an analyst coach - and we knew we could use an extra help. We looked for people and Toyz was interested. And he has become better since. In the first day, I guess he was a bit scarried because he didn't really want to tell us "do this" or "don't play this" or "you just lost the game because you failed". He wasn't very helpful at first but now he is because he brings a lot of insight to the picks especially. He told us that "our set-up would be bad if we picked that hero" or "you have to make sure to ban this first". He also tells us when we make mistakes without knowing what we should've done.
So he's not scared anymore to tell you when you're failing?
Yeah, he's very open with that. *laughs*
In the games against Samsung Blue, LMQ, OMG what's the moment that left the deepest impression with you?
Well, one would be the Nexus thing against OMG but that's more a bad one than a good one. A good one would be against Samsung Blue - we knew the Koreans were very good, not just individually but with objectives control as well, and we knew we had to be really good to be able to snowball a game against them. We took this advantage and snowballed it which is very good for us because they are better than us and we managed to beat them at their own game.
