How do you sum up today’s match?

I’m a bit sad and disappointed. There’s definitely some regret. I thought we showed a lot of G2’s strengths at this tournament, so we came in confident today—making it all the more unfortunate.

Once TES became your opponent, how did you prepare?

We studied their tendencies and put a lot of focus on playing through bot lane and on our early-game setups. That really came together in Game 2. TES are a team that accelerates the game very quickly, so we prepared with that in mind and matched them well early. But once they were able to control the game and lean into poke, it became very hard for us to break through.

You chose red side from Game 1—why?

As a team, we make good use of having the third and fifth picks to counterpick and to leverage flex picks. Both in scrims and on stage, our success rate with that approach has been high, so we opted into red side.

We also saw surprise pocket picks like Dr. Mundo and Ivern today.

Mundo is a very strong pick when the enemy comp is short on damage—he’s incredibly hard to kill. He’s also really good into Qiyana: he’s faster around the map and can even win the 1v1. As for the draft in Game 1, what we picked was weak into Akali; we knew they liked the champion, and that was clearly a mistake. In Game 3 we drafted the Caitlyn–Ivern duo, but our engage wasn’t great, and the opponents had both strong scaling and strong poke. Without a clean answer into that, the game became very difficult.

How did practice go leading up to the series?

Our scrims were excellent over the last two weeks, so we had high expectations for this matchup. Western teams often struggle in scrims, but this time our results were genuinely good.
If I had to point to two things about today’s performance: I’m quite dissatisfied with our draft, and we played more passively than we had in scrims. I think that’s why we lost.

Looking back on G2’s 2025 season?

Compared to previous years, we definitely took steps forward—but there’s still a lot of disappointment and a few regrets left over.

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.