shox: "SK and EnVyUs our biggest opponents"-case battle

Shortly after G2 secured a spot in the ESL Pro League Season 5 semi-finals with three wins and two defeats, we caught up with Richard "shox" Papillon to talk about G2's form, some of their matches in Group A, EnVyUs' surprising results, and the upcoming playoffs.

After beginning the tournament with only one win out of three matches and getting stunned by Cloud9 and Immortals, G2 finished the group with a 3-2 score following triumphs against SK and fnatic.

shox says there is definitely something wrong with G2 when they play lower teams

With wins over all the other three teams that ended up at 3-2, G2 made their way to the playoffs at the Pro League Finals.

After their last match, we sat down with Richard "⁠shox⁠" Papillon to find out whether they felt in form ahead of the tournament, what went wrong on day one, and more:

Let's first talk about the 4-16 loss to Cloud9 on Inferno, what happened in that match that made it such a hard loss?
I think first of all, they played pretty good, honestly, I didn't expect them to be that good on Inferno. About us, we had the worst situation on the T side. We eco'd them but then lost the eco, so we lost the money circle, which is really important on Inferno as on maps like Train. Then we put like three gunrounds on the side, but never consecutively, so we could never break them and they broke us like three times. So we ended the half with only four rounds, and going to CT side, you lose the pistol round and don't win the forcebuy, it's 14-4 and then it's really hard.
Going over to the other loss to Immortals, who came in with a new player, was there anything that perhaps surprised you on Overpass?
Not so much, I think we put way too much pressure on ourselves when we are playing teams we should win against and we're not playing how we know to play and what we are good at. And we can do that almost every time against big teams, but against lower teams, I don't know, there's definitely something wrong.
Yeah, talking about doing it against the big teams, you beat SK and fnatic, and starting with SK, I'm sure you were happy about them picking Cobblestone instead of Cache...
We were ready on both maps, but definitely I think Cobble is a really good map for us. But still, they've got big results on it recently, so we knew it would be a really tough map, so we gave our best because we knew it was our last chance. We gave everything and everything went well, people were hitting shots, we had good timings, we could read them well.
After not showing much at all since the French shuffle, EnVyUs are still in the running for a spot in the playoffs with the tiebreakers still left to be played, what do you make of your local rivals?
Honestly, they are good. For me, they are just continuing their progression, you can see it week by week. It's kinda slow, I would say, but they are getting better and better, you can find players who are getting in form recently, like RpK, xms, even Happy, maybe just ScreaM is not at his best level at the moment. But everything is going well and they are working a lot.
I don't know really what to expect from them, I think they still lack experience about getting to win a tournament or to a final, but they are definitely a tough opponent and can upset pretty much everyone, especially in best-of-one's.
Going back to your previous tournaments, I know you didn't practice ahead of them because of some personal issues, how did you feel going into the Pro League Finals form-wise now that you got to practice properly?
When we came back from Tours, I would say we were happy about our results in Austin and Tours, because we made semis and won a tournament. Even if the best teams weren't there, with our problems it was a good result. So going back from Tours, we put in a lot of hard work getting some tactics, getting everything ready on the maps, on both sides.
The only thing I would say, we are ready tactically, we can do everything on every map, so we have a good panel, but we still lack some practice. With the map pool, you have to be strong on six maps, six maps and both sides, so it's like 12 sides, you have a lot of different rounds, pistol rounds, forcebuys with UMPs and stuff, you have eco's with only pistols, gunrounds, people who are playing with double AWP. There's a LOT of stuff to work on, and you just need to practice to be ready for when it's gonna happen at tournaments, you are ready to face it and you know how to face it. I think we still need some details, but we are ready at this point, but the execution is not as good as it should be at the moment.
Now that you mentioned the double AWP, you are one of the teams who do like to go that route quite often, what are the strengths and weaknesses of that system?
The biggest strength about the double AWP is that you can get way more picks on the map, so you can get an early advantage. After, you can delay your stuff, because holding a line with an M4 or an AK is kinda hard, it's gonna be like a 50/50 duel, but if teams don't have a proper execution to get the area with smokes, flashes and molotovs, you can just keep the information on your area and delay with the AWP. If people don't contest you, then you can start to smoke or molotov at like one minute, or 45 seconds, and then you just fuck them up, so that's the biggest strength.
About the weakness, you have to take risks to get the picks, so sometimes it's a 5v4 but other times it would be 4v5, and you are kinda weak against strategies, like I said if you have three smokes, 10 flashes, two molotovs, with an AWP you can maybe get one kill but it's kinda over after. And for the retakes, getting into sites with an AWP is hard.
Going into the playoffs and the series, there are still a lot of teams in the running with the tiebreakers left and Group B wide open, but who do you see as your biggest threats in the best-of-three's?
The biggest opponent will definitely be SK, even if we beat them they are still a top team, fnatic, and EnVy, because it's a French derby, so you never know what's gonna happen in these matches.