| | As mentioned during our storyline about Team UK, you guys were quite splitted up during the last edition of NC which lead to rather disappointing results. This year, it seems the top players and veterans have mostly come together to play within the same team. Was it a difficult process to gather all of them?
Last year each of the three UK teams was essentially focused around different groups of friends and people that wanted to play with each other. Zach, who doesn't normally play in NCs, decided to make a UK2 team and was able to gather quite a lot of skilled UK players that would've been useful for UK1 to have. I made a UK3 team with my irl friends from the Senate and invited a few other friends like Fietta to play there as well. So yea, UK1 was deprived of a few key players but if you look at that roster and the one we are using this year, it's essentially the same except for a few additions. We managed to get M back playing with us, but unfortunately Deacon and Cleric haven't found time to be active. It wasn't that hard to bring everyone together, especially as most of us have played together in the past (either in NCs or clans), but we've had some activity problems along the way and only have 9 active players at the moment.
Speaking about which, Apollo leaving mid-way was certainly a heavy blow for the team, but you brought Pepper back in for the match against Turkey 2 in which he did quite well. Is that a permanent replacement for this match and potentially the next one or was it just to fill the gaps for the quarter-final?
Yep Pepper is gonna be with us for the rest of the tournament as a main archer. Unfortunately some drama happened between Apollo and another member of the team (I won't go into the specifics) and that led to him leaving the team. We've made some adjustments to make up for the loss.
Looking back at your performance in the group stage, you had a mixed performance with two stomps, two rather one sided losses and one close match against France in which you prevailed in the very last set. Did you manage to learn anything from these confrontations?
I think that inconsistency is somewhat to be expected. A lot of it is based on the maps and factions; the UK team has always been terrible on certain maps and this year is exactly the same. It's also partly to do with activity levels varying from week to week, not just with struggling to get scrims but with some individuals not finding time to play at all. I think quite a few other nations have had this problem this year as well. We've definitely learnt things from our defeats and hopefully we can properly use that knowledge to improve how we play as a team.
Gibby said:
"Although our team is worse on paper than the insanely good roster we had in 2016, I think this is our best chance of winning of any NC."
In your match against Turkey 2, you seemed to struggle with the start on the open map which was your opponent's pick. How do you plan on avoiding that against France, knowing you will start on their map's pick too, which is Waterfall?
Well Tardet I see you've come with a sneaky question to learn about our plan for the match vs France... Against Turkey 2 we probably didn't give them the appropriate respect on the first map; a lot of our guys were playing quite riskily, there was some messing around on TS and Turkey 2 were capable of punishing those rounds which people weren't taking seriously enough. There were a few other problems with co-ordination and such, but that result doesn't worry me at all. I have no idea what will happen against France. We have a plan, but whether it will work or not remains to be seen.
The UK has historically struggled to make it past thes semi-finals. Does this add an extra pressure to know you can still fail one more time at the gates of the grand-final or is starting to be a recuring theme for you guys and you are just gonna treat it like another day at work?
Unfortunately the UK seems to be cursed when it comes to Nations Cups. It's true that the UK team has never, in ten years, managed to win a semi-finals match. This year we have quite a different roster to, say, the roster of 2017 and the years before that; the likes of normanguy, hagrid, matt, hrod, mynes and puff haven't played that many NCs for the UK. Although our team is worse on paper than the insanely good roster we had in 2016, I think this is our best chance of winning of any NC. We have a good atmosphere on TS and there isn't much pressure or expectation on us to perform really well, especially as the UK always seems to fail at this stage. If we lose it's really just an "ohh well"; at least we made it to the semis again.
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