An update from germaine

We were in a good run of form towards the end of our time with Nick (toxjee), we were starting to improve and pick up some good results both at LAN and online (winning i44 and placing 3rd in the 1st CGi season), but as with most teams, real life commitments came in the way for him and we were forced to make a change.

I think we've made a good decision in picking up Petr (hectic) though; he plays in a similar way and is very tactically minded, as was Nick. I saw a lot of people giving Petr some stick on tek9 after Grunex this last weekend which was annoying to read, Petr made a lot of crucial frags for us and heck...at one point kept us in the tournament with a very tense 1v1 at 11-12 versus eSuba where I think I almost had a heart attack but hey, who cares what the critics think right?

I'm pretty disappointed with our finishing position from Grunex, but I don't think I will look back at the negatives of this event, I will instead look at the positives, we realised a lot of things this LAN. We have played 6 days since Christmas paradox- calculated after this LAN, which is terrible preparation for a LAN event but couldn't be helped too much, another team with a similar practice schedule is ANEXIS and look how they did this event....;)

Excuses aren't what I would like to fill this blog with though. Small things which you would work out simply through playing such as needing to nade a certain rush route or a cover your teammate from a certain spot, we didn't really have these things. And only after the "big" matches were we able to see some of these flaws in our game. A couple of our biggest matches came on mp_crash versus CRACKED, eSuba and Western Wolves, all very good teams. Our defence proved to be awful versus all three, our stop nades were awful allowing eSuba to dominate our A defence and for Western Wolves to dominate our B defence.

Only during and after these matches did we notice this and try to stop this. I'm actually extremely pleased with our attack on mp_crash though, we played it 'perfectly' in my eyes versus these teams, both times we were able to bring it back from a rather huge deficit and bring it level, all due to our strong attack. Again our stop nades let us down when we tried to for example rush A or middle, but our slow play was awesome, and our team play was awesome at times. There is definitely no doubting the individual skill at least :)

Hopefully in the coming weeks we can dramatically improve, I am only just learning how to play some spots with Petr, and the same goes for the others. He is actually a very easy player to play with and is often in the right spots, but it's more a case of being used to each other’s habits in-game. Other than this, we must do tactics tactics tactics! We are slacking!

Anyway, I will be at Epic.EIGHT with the guys this weekend, we will do our best and try to do our fans proud! After this event I will upload my config I have been using, and I will also try to do another blog from the event, maybe with some hardware reviews + demos + config....who knows ;)

ciao xoxo

P.S I would just like to say that we didn't try to conflict or lame Cracked at Grunex over the self-spec conspiracies, we actually thought they might have been using it, and chose not to say anything anyway, we didn't deserve to get further in the tournament, and Cracked had been playing awesome :) But Western Wolves, ESPC and some other team all went over to try and conflict them, I agree they should have, but it's not great to see people flaming us for no reason. We are lovely guys!!!!!!!