“With the Karmine Corp, you qualified for the Masters, the first intercontinental tournament of the Valorant season and the most prestigious of your career. What state of mind are you in before going to Madrid?
Ryad “Shin” Ensaad (Karmine Corp): It has a completely different flavor than the Lock-in (in February 2023, where Karmine was invited), because this time there was a qualification. Playing a tournament like that, with the best teams from each region, has something extra. It’s a lot of excitement, for me and for the whole team. We will try to gain experience and have as much fun as possible in this tournament.
After your victory at Lock-in, the first European tournament of the season, you must be full of confidence?
Confident, yes, but not overconfident either because we remain a fairly young team. We saw it at the Kick-off, slipping is always possible. Engh (Andrey Sholokhov, the team coach) repeats it a lot: the most important thing in this kind of tournament and especially for a team like ours, is to gain experience. We don’t even go there with the mentality of winning or as a favorite, but really to learn. I don’t know about the others, but it feels a little strange to see myself at the top of the tierlists on Twitter. It’s disorienting because I wasn’t used to being in this place last year or even at the beginning of the year (laughs).
In the game, however, you seem to have a lot of certainties…
Obviously, the Kick-off erased a lot of doubts. We knew during preparation that we were strong, the problem was more about being able to translate it into official matches and it will be a bit of the same challenge in Madrid. But our training always gives us the impression that we can go very far.
How do you explain that you are already at this level so early in your season, with such a well-established game, where we have seen other teams fumble a little?
I don’t know the working methods of the other teams, but I’m pretty sure that no one worked harder than us. Obviously, it helps us because we have come a long way, especially if we look at our level at the very beginning, when the team was formed. We are young players, so it’s easy: Engh tells us “you’re going to play so many matches per day” and we do them. Nobody is complaining and we are all hungry for the game. I also think that our coaching, our mental preparation, played a big role. It’s something I didn’t necessarily have confidence in before working on it with Youenn (Rocaboy, the mental trainer), but it helps me enormously.
You also had a crazy streak of 58 training victories during the month of February. Does this show that you really take all matches seriously?
Yes. And again, in training, we sometimes went there with the mindset of trying things more than winning… But we are very quick to apply ideas, we learn very quickly. It’s funny, because the day before February 7, the day we started our winstreak, Engh told us that with Gambit he had a very long period where he hadn’t lost a single match. I told him he just had to ask us. And since then we haven’t lost a single one. I don’t know if it hurt the team (laughs).
However, did it surprise you that the transition went so well from training to official matches? Given the inexperience of your group, we could have doubted it.
Yes still. I didn’t expect to win, going through the play-in, with the course we did… It really wasn’t the easiest course, with the slip against Team Heretics (loss 0 -2 in the group stage, which forces them to go through the play-in phase)… But this defeat was one of the best things that could have happened to us. We were able to play five matches on stage before facing Fnatic in the semi-finals, which is huge. Above all, having the experience of losing, especially by being massacred, taught us a lot. Heretics wasn’t at all the team we were most expecting, so it showed us that we shouldn’t underestimate anyone and keep our feet on the ground.
How did you then experience your exploit in the semi-finals against Fnatic (2-0), which was seen as the best team in the world in 2023?
Obviously, it was a match with apprehension, on my side but also for the whole team. Doing such substantial preparation helped us… We had a lot of data against them, because they didn’t change their squad, they played a lot last year. But at the same time, we prepared against them as we would against any team, which made playing Fnatic almost trivial. And behind that the final against Heretics (3-1 victory) was more representative of our level than our first match against them.
Do you experience what is happening to you as revenge for last year, when Karmine was the laughing stock of the European league for a long time?
A little. But everything is different with this team. I think that last year, we didn’t put all the chances on our side and it’s not a result that happened by chance. I’m mostly lucky and grateful to stay at this club after last year’s failure, because I don’t think anyone expected that there would be anyone staying…
You are in fact the only one of the five players from last season to have been retained. Is it a motivation boost?
Whether or not I continue in VCT (the Valorant Champions Tour, the world elite), it didn’t necessarily depend on me. If KC or Engh hadn’t wanted to try me, I probably wouldn’t have had a chance. The previous season had been trying and long, despite the low number of matches played, with the defeats and extra-sporting problems that followed one after the other… It was hard to get one’s head up during the season, but during the off-season , it was something else. When I passed the try-outs, I was already far from all that. I went there with the desire and the rage to prove what I am worth. The selection phase was extremely long, with many profiles and players tested, so being kept in the squad was an exceptional satisfaction.
Do you feel like you’ve made progress in recent months?
Mechanically, I don’t think there’s a big gap between last year’s me and this year’s me. At the start of 2023, I was in exceptional shape, which I did not necessarily find at the Kick-off, even if I am capable of it. But it’s mainly what I learned during the off-season that took me a step further. We worked a lot, stored up a lot of information. Although I don’t want to denigrate what I learned last year, because I learned a lot and it was my first year at the highest level.
You talk a lot about your amount of work and about Engh, your head coach, who is known for asking a lot of his players. Were you taken aback by his methods?
A little… But it’s not that annoying: if everyone wants to move forward and doesn’t mind making an effort, it goes very easily. We adapted quickly. It’s sure that it changes the working methods of other teams. I think that Engh has a rather unique leadership side: he is the one who steers the boat, who tells us where we are going, where he wants to go and we are subject to this direction, to this way of coaching. I’m not sure that all teams give the coach this freedom, but I realize now that it is very important.
From the outside, we have the impression that the integration of these instructions is made easier by the good understanding within your group. You confirm ?
Really. The fact that we are five young players (between 18 and 22 years old) helped a lot with the good understanding. Everyone has the same slightly carefree delirium with age, compared to last year when I was the youngest member of the team at 20 years old… We formed a tight-knit group very quickly.
What do you expect from these Masters?
A tournament that goes well would be a tournament without regrets. Because we can lose, it’s not a problem, but the problem would be to lose the way we lost against Heretics, for example. Defeat is part of the adventure, you can’t win all the time, but giving everything you have to give is the most important thing. »
2024-03-13 17:40:00
#Esport #Valorant #Shin #weird #top #tierlists
