After being 12-0 down against NRG in the 2-2 poule of Stage 1 of the Major, BIG managed one of (if not the) greatest comeback in a Major ever, winning 16 rounds in a row to defeat the NA team, book their spot for Stage 2, and keep their dream of playing in front of the German crowd alive. We spoke with JDC after the nailbiter to talk about their mental resilience, the next stage, and their road to the Major.

Pffft… What a game! Can you talk us through the last map a little bit?
To be fair, I don’t think we were necessarily playing bad on T-side, even though we didn’t get a round. They just had insane momentum, they were playing with f-cking balls and we were just kind of lacking reactions a little bit. I don’t know, I cannot even explain it. After the half we just said “okay we need to focus on mentally resetting and play round for round.” We have very good CT sides. I would say we are good on [Mirage], even though the score didn’t show that. I don’t know if they went inside themselves and just reset in three minutes, but we reached a flowstate after that that I have not seen in a while and it seemed like everything was just working, you know? I don’t think [NRG] necessarily played bad but things were just turning in our favour. I’m just very grateful, honestly.

For us watching at some point it just felt like the comeback was written in the stars, at what scoreline did you start thinking “maybe we can actually do this?”
To be fair I started believing at 12-6, 12-7 because I noticed we were playing exactly like in practice, we were in an incredible flow, we were not scared to make moves even though we were down. For example faveN was one of the guys making a round, where he double-kills in under while he was pushing B. I think it was actually the first gun-round we actually win. For me it was just a sign that we had nothing to lose anymore and we actually went with it, and it was truly amazing.

You had a very long road to Stage 2, I can imagine the Lanxess is in the back of your head now and you feel like you can do anything, but of course there’s still Stage 2 and 3. How are you preparing for that and working out these small details and mistakes that are still showing up?
I think this is a good reality check, just to see where we are at. We played a bit crumbly in many situations, which is normally not what we do in practice. We have to talk about why that is. it might be nerves, it might be not remembering the strat, or whatever it could be. I think it’s just going to go up from here, and I also believe we are not at our potential at all. We are playing at 60-70% in most games, making what I would call silly mistakes - me included - that we normally don’t make. Right now it’s just about finding our groove, and this probably helped a lot to get the confidence up, to get the belief up, and to just see what we do wrong. We will rewatch the game for sure even though we won and just evaluate.

When you’re in this match and you lose the overtime on Nuke, you’re 12-0 behind on Mirage, I can imagine you think back to the start of Stage 1 and the lost match against Liquid for example and think “it feels so stupid to have been less sharp at the start of this stage…”
Those thoughts can come up for sure, but I think you need to be really good at throwing them out of the window. The past just doesn’t matter. I’m a guy that’s very harsh to himself a lot. I was thinking before today already that in the GamerLegion game I didn’t show up like I wanted to show up, so I want to do it better today. But those thoughts are normally unhealthy and not good, so I think none of us were thinking about that. Everyone was just looking at as just a new game and what happened yesterday doesn’t matter and we just need to play our game.

About this year, you guys have been on an incredible tier two grind. Do you think that paid off here in these tense moments?
Oh for sure. I think the tier two/tier three scene is extremely underrated to some degree. The teams are very strong and very capable of beating good players and teams. Everyone said as well that we played very easy opponents until now, which statistically speaking is true because they are not at the rank that we should be and compared to the Major teams they are not that strong, but they still know how to play CS. They play with passion, they play full-time, they want to beat us really hard. It definitely gave us resilience and it hardened us a lot.

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