G2's Romain Bigeard on expectations around G2: "There's always a lot of hope on us"

Not the most straightforward win, once again. What happened out there? How are you doing?

A win is a win, as they say — it was sus. But I think we needed a win to get going, to reassure ourselves a little. After yesterday’s defeat, which was a bit weird, we really didn’t play well. They played worse for the whole early game. But then ShowMaker woke up and, well, we didn’t deserve to win that game anyway, so it ended as expected. So of course you turn up today a bit on edge, especially in a trap game, against guys who have nothing to lose. So we had to get ourselves into it a bit.

Skew had decided to pull out all the stops, so hats off to him, great decision, that was nice to see. Perkz did a good job of putting him in confidence, we had a superb drift from BB on the Herald — I didn’t even know you could take that angle. So that was cool, and our tournament is officially underway.

Full interview (in french) on the OTPLoL broadcast from 45:53.

I want to come back to yesterday, and to today as well, because the games look alike: you’re ahead in the early game. What worries me a little is that the mid-game is usually what shows a team has structure, that it’s confident. Do you consider yourselves confident despite those slip-ups?

The mid-game depends enormously on communication and on decision-making under pressure, and I think we were a bit scared, because it’s a big tournament, because of this and that, we’re discovering the stage…

There’s a lot of hope being placed on you. Would you say that plays a part too?

There’s always a lot of hope on us, in a way. So that’s not necessarily one of the biggest pressures. No, it’s the pressure we put on ourselves. We tell ourselves, “we’ve had a good year, we’re hot, it’s now, let’s go,” and so on. And yesterday was a bit crazy, you know. The four chinese teams losing… I think they got hit by a huge dose of jet lag. They arrived, and I saw them eating sus stuff too. They pay less attention to food than we do, at least. [laughs]

The difference with an EWC or a First Stand is that the tournament isn’t one week long, so whatever happens, we see it every single time: you’ve got the best of one, then the best of one. We’ve started a Worlds 2-0 and not made quarters, we’ve started a Worlds by losing the first one and made quarters, so we’ve seen it all. So you have to take the days one after the other, enjoy this extraordinary event where we’re surrounded by the best players in the world, and that’s it.

We’ve heard here and there that scrims were going well, and sometimes that they were going badly — mostly that it went badly at the start. You’ll obviously give the final scrim results at the end. Is the team confident? That’s my real question.

Of course. And I hope most of the people spitting one way or the other about the scrims will have the honesty to go and compare what they were saying with the scrim results, which will be published at the end of Worlds, obviously. We lost a few days of scrims, yeah — those are days where we were working on things. I’m very happy with all the scrims we had. We learned a lot of things, we prepared things well. We had some cool stuff against Asian teams too, as people will be able to see from the way it’s structured.

I think it’s pretty classic: if you beat G2, you’re going to talk about it, and if G2 beats you, you say nothing. At the end of the day, all that counts is playing on stage, and all that counts is getting out of this Swiss stage and winning the best of threes. That’s all that counts, you see. Even if we’d lost today, honestly we’d have been very, very sad, but in the end, if you win all the best of threes afterwards, it’s fine. I’m still by that 2-0 where we start and then lose. One best of three, two best of threes, three best of threes, you go home, it’s… That’s the beauty of Worlds, there are narratives everywhere. You have to stay in the present, you have to enjoy yourself, and… and off we go!