zonic: "We have to play better if we want to beat Vitality"

Falcons are currently regarded as one of the best teams in the world, however the much-coveted position of #1 team in the world is still a long way away for the squad as Vitality have proven an incredibly difficult opponent for the team.

This is something that was evident to Danny "zonic" Sørensen when Dust2.us Editor in Chief Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore spoke to him following their win over GamerLegion on Friday. The two also discussed the win over GamerLegion, Falcon's map pool, and the team's busy travel schedule, among other topics.

The full interview can be found below on YouTube or in text form below. All questions and answers below have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

That was a pretty close game against GamerLegion all things considered. Anything you can point to that led to such a close showdown?

First of all we have to give credit to GamerLegion. They are a great team who can always pose a threat to us big dogs I would say. We always know we have to play our A-game to beat them. They have played with acoR before, the coach knows him and he knows his philosophy.

It can go both ways when you're playing with a stand-in, they felt composed and had a really great tournament so props to them. This might be the last tournament of the season for them because they're not going to the Major, but they definitely should've been because they are an underrated team that people should fear.

Falcons dropped their map pick, Nuke, in this series and have struggled on it in recent times. Does that give you pause for thought on whether it should come out tomorrow against Vitality?

It's always special when you go up against Vitality, I don't really know about our Nuke. I need to go back to the hotel and watch the demos. I think we get a little too easily confused and we don't have our rotations in place, and know where the gaps are on the map.

It just feels a little bit off as a team today but we'll go home to analyze it and be better for tomorrow. Without disrespecting anyone and ourselves, we have to play better if we want to beat Vitality.

Where do you think that confusion comes from? Is it tied to the recent addition of m0NESY?

From Melbourne and on to BLAST Rivals we were having this honeymoon period where yes we made a lot of mistakes but we were just taking fights and was enjoying it. Now we are trying to implement more stuff for us to be more consistent.

On Nuke today was just a little bit off and we had some similar issues against HEROIC where we left some gaps that we weren't supposed to. You're always trying to work on six maps at a time but sometimes you put the focus on different maps and Nuke is still one of our better maps, but maybe we haven't put enough focus on it.

Still some work to do, in a couple of weeks you can't be ready on all six maps. We have room for improvement on Nuke.

Do you think the decision to attend IEM Dallas gives the squad enough time to prepare for the BLAST.tv Austin Major?

I think it's tough because when we accepted the invite we were in a totally different place with the VRS system. There are definitely some things [about the VRS system] that should be looked at when it comes to optimizing it because we are a team who needs to fight for VRS points and stay high on the rankings.

For that you need to accept these invites way before and if you don't the team just below you that you're competing directly against will get the invite. That's fair enough, but the system for underdogs especially is not good enough and when you're not part of the top three with a lot of points secured you can definitely get punished for not attending events as much as possible, which in my opinion is a very bad situation.

We could potentially see players skip events due to health issues and I'm really concerned for the health of the players.

Does it give you any bad flashbacks to the extremely demanding schedule you had on Astralis? Is the current schedule tenable with its level of saturation and the demands it places on teams?

We definitely have an issue. Last year I understood from Valve's point of view that you need to have other entities come into the scene so it's not just BLAST and ESL having these franchise leagues, and their intentions are good, but unfortunately it forces teams to [constantly] play, especially outside the top three.

It's coming to a point where it's a bit scary.

Taking on Vitality and apEX tomorrow, do you have any thoughts on taking on an IGL who plied his trade and became a top-tier IGL under you on Vitality?

First of all, apEX deserves all of the credit himself. I'm just proud and happy that I could be a part of adding a few percentage points to who he is today. He's a phenomenal leader, phenomenal captain and obviously the last three games for us have been rough against him.

It's going to be a tough task and he's very hard to counter because he can play all styles. apEX can play slow, fast, unpredictable, pushing smokes, etc. and it's not just him, the way he calls I know that. It's going to be a tough game going up against the best team in the world.

Falcons would go on to be eliminated in a nail-biter 2-1 series against Vitality in the semifinals. They will need to regroup ahead of the BLAST.tv Austin Major when their journey starts on June 7th.