EliGE: "I would definitely say there was a conflict of vision of how we wanted to play across the board"

Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore caught up with Liquid rifler Jonathan "EliGE" Jablownowski after Liquid's opening match loss to Astralis at IEM Atlanta.

EliGE spoke about the tough loss to Astralis, Liquid's internal struggles in 2026, and what they are doing to improve going into the second half of the year.

Find the video interview below with a full transcription underneath. All questions and answers have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Things didn't go to plan on Dust2, but we did see some signs of life on Ancient. Starting with Dust2, your pick, not a lot good to say about it as you went down 13-4. What do you think went so wrong on your map?

We were missing a little bit of comms. Missing info in different rounds. Also, in some rounds on Ancient, I think we forced things too much. We don't let the rounds come to us as much as we should or could.

But, a lot of times we had good chances to win. Even on the pistol, we didn't have a unified call of how we were going to fight as soon as we identified the guy was car. I think that is a good explanation of how the rest of the half went. That's what I'd say.

Regarding the comms issue, I'm interested in that because the core of this roster has been together for a while now. You're coming up on a year with this Liquid roster, siuhy's been here for a similar amount of time, NAF's been here forever. Why do you think the team is still struggling in its comms despite this tenure playing together?

I think it's improved. It's hit or miss per map. I think there's sitll some nerves in the games. I definitely feel like there's a different atmosphere comparing scrims to officials. I think that has been a consistent issue since I've joined. I don't think that there's an easy solution for it, other than recognizing the issue.

Things don't seem like they're clicking in the server compared to scrims. That's hard to hear in the sense that no one in this team is a rookie. You've all been around for a long time and have experience. Are people still uncomfortable with each other? Why do you think you're still struggling mentally when it comes to converting it to officials?

I think we're doing better since Rio in terms of getting on the same page. We're dedicating more time to theory and review. Talking about situations, how we want to playing things, adding more protocols. I think that it has improved.

That's why it's very disappointing that Dust2 went the way that it did. Ancient also looked much better, signs of life, like you said before. We have it in us. It's just getting it out consistently, and at the same time, I don't think we've had so much time getting on the same page.

I wish we had more of that before. Of course, you only come to the conclusions after you've tried something and it didn't work. So, this is the one we're at now. I think that it has improved, and I want to show that at this tournament.

I think that we should have won today. I don't think it was very impressive from [Astralis]. It was very in our hands and we could have won. I think it's on us to show that in the next games.

I find your comments similar to a conversation I had with NertZ at BLAST Fort Worth. We had a chance to ask him what he thought of his time in Liquid and why he lost his confidence. He talked about a conflict of personalities and vision in the team.

Do you think his comments align with the issues that you think Liquid have been having? What do you think his feelings of losing confidence and conflicts between players on the team come from?

I would definitely say there was a conflict of vision of how we wanted to play across the board. The entire team had different visions. I thought it would be a little more in line when I was joining. As we dug a little deeper and talked about more things, we were more off-sync than I expected. That's why now, in the past couple weeks, we started going more in-depth.

NertZ had a different vision than siuhy, and flashie has a different vision. There's just a lot of different ways that we were seeing things and trying to make everyone happy. It wasn't working out.

NertZ is now off at G2 and you pick up MalbsMd from G2, do you think everyone is on the same page in the team now?

I think much more, yeah. We are more on the same page. Things have been improving. I think that we have some stronger maps that we focused more on these things and some aren't as strong because we only had so much time between then and now.

We're going to see you in the lower bracket tomorrow, it's going to be a must-win match for you. How important is it to try and find a win here in Atlanta before the Major?

It's super important; we also have CAC after this, so we do have one more tournament. I don't think it's more about the Major form. Of course, that is a big factor. For us, we need wins just to get invites for the second season. Every single match is extremely important for us.

It would be sad, as well, putting in all this work and looking better, feeling like we're doing the right thing and not having anything to show for it. We know what we should be doing, we put in a lot of work between Rio and now. We have way more to show than what we did today.

It's been a long time since we've seen an NA team make playoffs in NA. Is it something that you're looking forward to, filling that six-seven-year gap of having an NA player on stage?

Yeah, six or seven, for sure. I would love to be on the stage and in the playoffs here in Atlanta. It's just baby steps. One match at a team. We haven't been in that many playoffs since joining Liquid again.

Liquid are facing NA rivals M80 to stay alive at IEM Atlanta at 07:00PM tonight.