SEMPHIS: "I want to take the punishment ... and do better in Europe"

Losses to G2 and FURIA called for a quick 0-2 elimination for Nouns. Despite bowing out early, head coach Kory "SEMPHIS" Friesen is searching for growth opportunities in defeat as he and his team look ahead to another chance to earn a victory in Europe in a future event. Following Nouns' loss to FURIA, SEMPHIS spoke with Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore regarding how the FURIA match played out, cynic's development as a leader, CCT, and more.

Please note that the full interview can be found below on YouTube, while the transcript has some key snippets from their conversation.

What went wrong in the matchup to make it so one-sided?

We had to decide if we wanted to let them pick Vertigo or not, and it was like, we used to be decent at Vertigo and then it felt like people figured it out and we lost our confidence on the map. Then we started trying Anubis a little bit, but we also aren’t confident in that so we banned Vertigo hoping they would pick Ancient or something else because their Anubis win rate isn’t super high either. Logically, it is not a bad choice.

It is smart for them to do if they did prep work for us. So good play by them, I would have picked Anubis versus myself as well. It was just a gamble that didn’t go our way for that map, so Anubis is kind of just chalked. We were not in a position to win that, we needed to win Inferno and then we’d have a chance on Mirage but our Inferno has been so shaky against the better teams. I think one of the things we have to do is learn to take the rounds a little bit later.

How do you feel cynic has developed as an IGL since you started working with him?

I joined during Gaimin Gladiators and I think there has been a pretty big improvement from when I first joined to now but there is always work to be done. I think one of the biggest things on our team, and this isn’t specific to him, you know, is tilt when we go down 0-5, 0-6, you know, those are bad starts for us and we are not the most resilient against the good teams. Sure, if you’re playing a team that you’re better than, you can just win a couple and get your momentum back.

When we lose our momentum against good teams, we just get crushed. I have a hard time finding the exact reason for it but to me, it seems to be preparedness. When you don’t have a lot of fallback plans and you start losing then people start to lose hope…

David likes to call really fast strats and I think they’re really good. But I have a hard time because I don’t want to get away from the strengths but I also want to bring in some more, I don’t want to say like big strats because anyone can just run an execute, but more map control into plays… I don’t feel we do that enough so that is something I am trying to bring toward us because we don’t really need to do it in NA for most of the people we play. I think that is the biggest thing for us, if we could practice and get punished more versus better teams it would help us realize where our weaknesses lie.

You said you’re probably going to Serbia to play one of those online CCT cups. Is it one of your goals to get punished by EU and beat our bad habits from the weak NA scrims with weak NA teams?

Well, we got punished here so I want to take the punishment and focus on the boot camp and do better in Europe. That’s the goal, it’s always improvement. This is the biggest event they’ve probably ever attended. You could make an argument the RMR is more prestigious because you’re qualifying for the Major and sticker money is a big amount of that so I think the pressure for qualifying for the RMR is actually higher.

But in terms of the actual tier of teams here, this tournament is way harder… Even though our result was poor, the teams we played were much better than anyone we have played before, and that is not making excuses, we deserved to lose.

Watch the full interview below: