casle on Astralis with HUNDEN: "We were more like two coaches"
Astralis have gotten off to a somewhat mixed start since bringing in two new additions to their lineup over the most recent offseason. Losing their opening two games at BLAST Fall Groups, the Danes would win the next two matches to return to the Royal Arena. IEM Cologne would be a different sort of start, winning both of their Play-in games before immediately being sent to the lower bracket by G2 in the opening game of the group stage.
As for their match against NiP today in that lower bracket, the legendary organization left no question as to what version of their team would show up, destroying their Swedish opponents, and former teammate Kristian "k0nfig" Wienecke in dominant fashion. After the game, Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore caught up with Peter "casle" Toftbo Ardenskjold to chat about the match, his new sidekick Assistant Coach, and
Please note that the full interview can be found below on YouTube, while the transcript has some key snippets from their conversation.
The match was an absolute race, how did you maintain such a high momentum throughout the entire match?
I think actually we got a pretty bad start on Vertigo. I took a quick timeout just to remind the guys how we want to play and how we want to communicate and be as a team and as soon as they heard that I think it just clicked from there.
R0nic was recently promoted from the Academy team to the main team to act as your Assistant Coach. It seems like Astralis have a habit or a trend of promoting Assistant Coaches so I wanted to ask was that your decision to bring him into the fold or how did R0nic find his way into the main Astralis squad?
Yeah that's on me. I've played with R0nic myself, taught him most of the things that he knows and I got him the chance on the Talent team which he did really, really well on so of course I wanted him on the first team as soon as possible. Yeah, that's on me.
Of course recently we also have to mention the fact that HUNDEN left the organization and it sort of coincided with R0nic coming up around the same time. Is he sort of filling that role in the team that HUNDEN had? Is there a sort of direct one-to-one role change between the two of them?
I think it is not 100% the same as with HUNDEN. We were more like two coaches, now we are like coach and assistant coach. Me and R0nic work together extremely well so it's a perfect match.
