dephh: "It's on individuals stepping up in their moments when they need to"

M80 have continued NA's poor run of form at the BLAST.tv Austin Major with a Bo1 loss to TYLOO to kick off Stage Two. With M80 having a mixed year, a lot rides on the boys to carry the banner and secure a spot in Stage Three.

Following M80's loss to the upstart Chinese squad, M80's head coach, Rory "dephh" Jackson about the loss, Mason "Lake" Sanderson's poor Major debut, M80's poor start at the events, and what they will focus on to rebound in their Round Two matchup.

Not the result you wanted to start your Major run. What do you think went wrong on Train especially in the second half?

We lost the pistol on CT and recovered it with eight gun rounds so we had their number on the CT-side and then... I don't know, we've had this lingering problem of having nice CT halves and not being able to win that pistol just to have really clean games.

The first and second gun rounds on the T-side just went bad and it's really hard to recover. It was a bit of a firepower problem and we'll have to go look at the strategy again but for the most part there were some key moments where we should be entrying and killing and winning rounds and then converting them and it just didn't happen today.

If we're looking at firepower in this match, it goes without saying Lake had a really rough game and didn't produce a lot of impact. Why do you think he struggled so much against TYLOO?

I think he's still trying to find his ground and be consistent with it. In practice he's by far our biggest fragger behind slaxz- so as the tournament goes on I think you'll see Lake get more comfortable.

Does that come down to it being his first Major? Did the other rookies struggle with that today?

Everyone seems comfortable, no one seems super nervous. No one even in the game, there were some moments where I thought 'oh he seems a little nervy,' but for the most part it's just every tournament we go we have a rough start and it's just the way it is.

Hopefully we can go out and fuck some people's pick'ems up.

That's a really tough thing to just brush off considering a rough start puts you one or two losses away from elimination at most events. Why do you think that has been a continuous problem for the team?

Yeah I've tried to put my finger on it. The way that we prepare games has got better but it's on individuals stepping up in their moments when they need to and performing in the first game and not always the second game.

We always go into the second game looking like a sharper team and yeah it's one of them things that I'm not sure why, we've been working really hard to try and fix it but we're moving on to the 0-1 game.

You have precious little time to prepare for that game, how are you going to spend it?

Preparing for the Major every team has to focus on themselves more than the opposition. You don't have the time to go do a whole night of study and prep so we're going to make sure we clean up some of the stuff we showed here.

Our map pool I think we filled a lot of holes in it between Astana and now. Hopefully we can prove we can play six maps right now.

With all three NA teams being eliminated in Stage One, does that add extra pressure to M80 to perform here and try to make the arena?

I think that's kind of gone away with the fact other regions are now very competitive. I don't think players think about that at least. Obviously the Asian region now seems to be playing much better than in the past but I don't think there's that NA pride thing going on.

For the most part we just want to have good wins and show what we're capable of.

M80 will look to bag a win when they take on OG later today at 07:15PM.