Heroic Xizt: “Crowd-wise, [IEM Rio] is the best Major in my career.”

Yesterday, the IEM Rio Major has moved into its last stage, with the remaining eight teams fighting to become the first Major CS:GO Champions to lift the trophy in Brazil. Following yesterday’s quarterfinal victories of MOUZ and Outsiders against Cloud9 and Fnatic, there are only two spots left in the upcoming semifinals.

Besides the Natus Vincere vs. FURIA matchup, the other two teams that are still waiting for their quarterfinal showdown, set to be played tonight in Rio’s Jeunesse Arena, are Heroic and Team Spirit.

In this matchup, the Danish powerhouse Heroic is considered a clear favorite, coming from Legends into the Champions Stage as the number three squad with a score of 3-1. Although they managed to defeat Team Liquid in the Round 4 match following the loss against Cloud9, it wasn’t a particularly easy game, which got the Heroic fans a little worried.

In an interview ahead of the IEM Rio Champions Stage, Fragster talked with the Heroic coach Richard “Xizt” Landström about what happened in those two matches, how prepared is the team feeling ahead of the quarterfinals following three days off, and what are their impressions from the first CS:GO Major in Brazil.

Feeding off the crowd

Fragster: How is the team spending their day off? Training? Relaxing? 

Xizt: In Heroic, we try to go out and enjoy the beach, the better of it. Some team activities like football or we go in the ocean maybe. But we’ve been working really hard as well. That’s where we spend the most time in our practice room at the hotel. We’ve been out for some Brazilian barbecue as well, which was really amazing. So far, the trip to Rio has been a really great experience. 

A lot of people noticed that the Legends Stage didn’t go as well as they hoped it would. After losing to Cloud9, your next match against Liquid already had the fans worried about you. Was it just nerves and nothing more, or did Heroic really encounter some problems that they didn’t know about before? 

I would say in the game against Cloud9 we didn’t really play good fundamental Counter-Strike, we did a lot of basic mistakes, we didn’t rotate as much as we should do in CT. We became kind of stale and not as dynamic as we usually are. It’s something that we talked about and worked on before the Liquid game. 

I think so far, except for the Cloud9 game, we’ve been doing really well at this event. We played really good matches, so I wouldn’t say that we get that we play badly because of pressure or nerves anymore. We’re really feeding off the crowd, they’re cheering for us and we love it a lot. 

What did you manage to learn about your future rival Team Spirit? In your opinion, are they fairly called playoff outsiders, considering the fact that they also managed to pass the extremely tough Legends stage just like you did? How do you rate this matchup?

They have a really young team, same as us, maybe a little bit younger. I think we also have similar playstyles, we also like to rotate around a lot, especially as CT. I don’t want to put any like 50-50 percentage on it or something, but I think it’s gonna be a really good game and I’m confident in our team that we can get the job done.

What do you think about the Major in Brazil? Do you have a message for fans, anything like that? 

So far the experience here in Brazil at the Major has been really amazing. I think crowd-wise, it’s the best Major so far in my career that I’ve been at. So I’m just looking forward to going into the Jeunesse Arena, to playing there with an even bigger crowd. It’s gonna be really amazing.

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