After the stellar performance of day 2, Fnatic struggled to translate similar success to their matches on day 3. Despite a good performance, they couldn’t finish with the two wins as expected. Right after their match against RNG Fnatic’s jungler Broxah took the time to explain how it was to play with sOAZ again and what went wrong against RNG.

DrPuppet – Describe your feeling after outjungling Peanut, winning against Kingzone, starting well today; playing with sOAZ and now this match.

Broxah - Yesterday felt really good. It was like a redemption for us. Since the first day didn't go that well. So it felt really good to get some wins and even one against Kingzone.

So we obviously hoped we could keep the streak going, sOAZ got a game as well so that was really nice. It felt really good to be back on stage with him again. Then we also should have won the game against RNG as well, but we did so many small individual mistakes and we just lost in the end. So it is really bittersweet.


I can understand. Describe it to me how it felt to play with sOAZ again, I believe you didn't get to practice a lot with him due to his break. Did the team dynamic change at all?

We have been scrimming a bunch with sOAZ but not too much. It didn't feel weird at all, at this time I have played so many games on stage with sOAZ so it felt really natural.

Actually, we didn't think really if it was either sOAZ or Bwipo at all, it just felt like our top laner. It just felt normal.


I saw a tweet earlier from sOAZ not being very happy with his performance but you answered to him that his performance was a 10/10 because he helped the jungler. Would you like the explain the full context of it?

If I remember correctly it was around level 3 and Olaf was about to invade me, so I asked if sOAZ could cover me so he doesn't take my red buff. So he did, but for that sOAZ had to give a lot of pressure top lane. Then, later on, he had to use teleport bot lane and it wasn’t his decision, it was a team decision. This put him a level behind in the top lane matchup. After that, he did a mistake and got ganked, but again it is very difficult to avoid a gank against Camille and Olaf. This put him another level behind and after that he couldn’t do anything anymore as Camille was too far ahead. sOAZ was put behind due to team decisions than his own. Realistically his performance wasn’t 10/10 since there is always something you can do better, but his performance wasn’t poorly at all.


Let’s about the RNG game now. You brought out the Aurelion Sol and clearly have been showing up more comfortable when it comes to team fights and pick off compositions this tournament. Even this draft should have been fairly “easy going” for you guys in the early game. However, you dropped very important kills to Uzi and Ming in the early game. How much did the two deaths on Rekkles change that?

From the jungle perspective the early game would be pretty rough for me as I had to play against a Graves, which is known for pressuring and playing really aggressive on you in the early game, but he didn’t really do that so I was chilling and farming around.

While Caps and I were in good spot our bot lane got put behind really hard. Then after our bot lane died in a 2v2 scenario the game became extremely difficult for us as a team. Obviously, uzi and Ming are a strong duo and Uzi ended up killing everyone left and right. It definitely hurt as a bit but it wasn’t completely the reason why we lost.


RNG dropped their bot lane laning advantage to play Xayah and Rakan. Rakan, in general, has been a very strong pick in this patch and tournament. What is it about Rakan that teams still drop laning phase advantage to play Rakan?

As soon as Rakan hits level 6 I feel like he applies automatically so much pressure because of his ultimate. Even if you are far away from your team you have to keep it in mind that Rakan has ult and he could jump on you and there is basically no counterplay to his ultimate when used correctly. So even in late game team fights, you have to be super careful, especially Rekkles had to be super careful. You have to be careful to not be engaged on, then if he jumps on one of our carries they just die, they are instantly deleted from the map. So summing it up as soon as he hits six due to his ult he has too much pressure and this extends throughout the whole game and it brings a certain mental advantage to have Rakan in your team.


How did you handle as a team RNG’s draft in the mid-game. They had the better draft in the mid-game, while also Xayah got strong, especially hit his two item spike and Rakan had more freedom to force fights against you. How did you handle it this game specifically?

So it depends a lot on the situation, but in this especially we had a strong mid and jungle since Caps and I were really strong. However, they had a strong bot lane so it kind of made up for it. For them, the plan was to play around Uzi and we knew that. So we tried to make plays around Caps instead. In the end, we were pretty lucky because if we were behind as well it would have been rough. Then we wouldn’t have been able to do anything and they could slowly push out our turrets. So this kind of saved us in the early and mid game.


What actually happened in the last fight against RNG? You had a good positioning, you managed to secure the elder drake very well, but somehow you didn’t commit to the engage. You started a fight but Rekkles started backing off. Was there a communication issue or what did exactly happen there?

The last fight was kind of forced in a way. On one hand we didn’t want to fight for the Elder but on the other hand, if they straight took the Elder drake we would have straight lost the game. So we didn’t have much of an option adding up to that we were still behind at this point. So they had a lot more gold after taking all the objectives and at the same time, we were a little bit underleveled. So what we actually wanted to do was to stall out the game for at least five to ten more minutes, so we would be good to go and ready to fight.

Since we didn’t really have a choice it turned into a very example why we lost the game, people were just not on the same page. Then Bwipo wanted to go in and Rekkles was jumping out at the same time, so Bwipo just died for no reason at all. These small mistakes from people not being on the same page or small mechanical mistakes cost us some fights and ended up losing us the game.


From the way you are answering the question, can I assume that you are still very confident that we will be seeing you in Paris and doing well?

I’m still pretty confident that we will make it to the top four and I think we have proven by now that we can challenge and compete with every team at this tournament. In my opinion, we should have won both games against RNG now and it sucks that we didn’t. We are in a weird spot standing wise but if we focus, play right and don’t choke we should beat the other teams and make it to the final round in Paris.


Any message to your and Fnatic fans?

Thanks for the support and believing in us!