TL Spawn on Josedeodo’s level: “I think Jose is maybe even the best player in the West”

How is the team feeling going into this Worlds — in practice and in the overall mindset? Do you feel like you’re still riding the momentum from the LCS final?

Yeah, I think so. When we came into the first part of our bootcamp in LA we were really confident, quite comfortable, because we’re still at our facility. We scrimmed a lot of the European teams and it was going quite well. Now we’ve moved over to Texas and the hotel, and it’s still going quite well — a couple of rocky days, but that’s to be expected at Worlds, and that’s actually part of the fun. Everyone gets off the plane super excited to scrim, sometimes you’re even trying a little bit too hard.

But I’d say they’re jet lagged, we’re not, we’re from America, and that’s part of the advantage you get as a home Worlds team. So we’re still quite confident, but at the same time we have to set realistic expectations. We’re not going to come in and try to be world beaters — we’ve still got to play our game.

Now that you know you’re facing CFO first, are you putting extra emphasis on preparing specifically for them, or given the best-of-one format of the Swiss stage, are you doing your homework on every team?

It’s a little bit of both, honestly. We’ve got a pretty good staff, so Haitham really deep-dove into CFO and I’ve watched a lot of their VODs, whereas Spookz is just trying to get us good drafts against everyone, to be completely honest. Best-of-one really is a little bit of a pain, because you don’t know which way it’s going to go. We’re not sleeping on CFO — we think they’re a really good team. I actually lost to them one other time, at First Stand last year, with a bit of a different roster. We just know the danger of sleeping on the LCP teams. They’re quite dangerous, especially in best-of-ones.

What do you think of people saying this was a rigged draw — that you got an advantage over the EU teams in round one?

I definitely think it’s true that we got a better round-one draw than you guys. But the beauty of Swiss is that as soon as you win or lose your first game, you go into your own pool, so we’ll see what happens in the long run. People say it can be a weaker draw if you have to get to the knockout phases. We’re not thinking about any of that shit, to be honest. It’s just: who did they put in front of us? Okay, let’s go out there, try and beat them, move on with the tournament.

Have you prepared for every team here already, or is that something you’ll figure out as the Swiss goes on?

There are some teams we’re way more prepared for than others, but we’re trying to look at everyone and not write people off — especially because you have teams like LOS coming in that people probably don’t know much about, but they’re actually a pretty solid team. Even if you just bump into their players in solo queue, you see they have really solid fundamentals. So you can’t really sleep on anyone. For example, one of our main scrim partners was G2, so we’d feel pretty good going into a series against them — but I’m sure if you interviewed Luka, he’d say the exact same thing about us. Some teams we know a little bit more about, but we’re trying to give respect to everyone.

I’ve always rated TL’s macro very highly — probably the best in the LCS all year. But watching your playoff run, the biggest difference felt like your teamfighting. That was one of your biggest weaknesses against T1 at MSI. Has that been a major focus this split?

Absolutely, and for the exact reason you said. You go up against these Asian teams, and even if you beat them around the map and get a 1,000, 2,000 gold lead, at the end of the day they drag you to Dragons — you have to be able to fight them there, and we weren’t able to do that at MSI. So we went away and put a lot of emphasis on it. We have a lot of good conversations about how we want to approach fights and get ourselves in a good position, but at the end of the day the players are going to take over with their hands, and they’ve done a really good job of that this split. We’d lose games domestically where we had good leads against LYON or C9 and then lost teamfights. So being able to execute so well and not really drop any teamfights in the LCS playoffs was really nice.

As a coach there are plenty of ways to help with macro, but how do you actually help players with micro — their individual execution?

A couple of things. We changed our communication style. We were quite an excited team in teamfights — sometimes we still get a little too excited — so we tried to remove some of the comms from teamfights so people could play their own screen, as opposed to having to do the team thing. If you play your own screen, it gives you an easier time to execute your micro. The other thing is that if our approach to the fight is good and we’ve actually marked flanks and taken a wider angle, the actual in-game teamfighting becomes a lot easier. Those are the two biggest things. And as a coach, sometimes you got to take a backseat and allow your players to spend five or ten minutes looking at the specifics of the fight with each other. Spookz and I are confident in our game knowledge, but the way the game feels, what they’re actually looking at in game — that’s only up to the players. So you have to give them that space and kind of shut up sometimes. We do that as well.

You shared your scrim schedule recently and the volume stood out — around 300 games in a single split, with a 77% win rate across them. Is that where the secret lies?

Absolutely. We are very hard workers — I think it’s a hallmark of a Spawn team. We’ll night block a lot. I personally put a lot of emphasis on the idea that if you do the work, you should be confident against everyone. The good thing about this team is they stay positive during all of it. I’ve had teams in the past that get really bogged down and we have to remove scrims, but this team actually loves the game. That allows us to work on a lot of different things, because we still need time to say, okay, we need to focus on our macro this game, look at our lane swaps, are we relying too much on our hands — and then in other scrims you’ve got to say, okay guys, just go into the game and play like psychopaths, get the most individual practice out of this. Having more scrims allows us to do that. As for the win rate, we didn’t really care, because some of it is against Dignitas, who are obviously a weaker opponent — but we actually found they were quite good to practise against. Macro-wise, they move around the map pretty well, so you focus on that with them.

You also had very good practice results against LYON — 70% is quite good.

LYON as a team, because Inspired wasn’t there, had some interesting scrim things going on, so we actually stopped scrimming them a little bit. There are two things to that: A, a lot of their early games would explode, and B, we didn’t want to make them too much better towards the end of the split. When Inspired comes back, you don’t want to have given that edge back to them — we felt like we had an edge. Whereas with C9 we felt pretty confident, so we gave a lot of games to C9, and in the end they kind of got better and they nearly beat us in the best-of-five. So it’s a double-edged sword both ways — you try to be strategic with your scrims.

A big part of TL’s success this year has been Jose. When you brought him in there were question marks about how he’d adapt to the LCS after spending most of his career in LATAM. Did you genuinely expect that by the end of the year people would rank him above Inspired in their Worlds tier lists?

I don’t know if I expected him to be above Inspired — that would be a lie. But I thought Jose was a better fit for our team. Culturally he’s very fun-loving, a really good human. And I thought he’d be the second-best jungler in the region — better than everyone apart from Inspired. So if I can get a really good culture piece who’s hungry and wants to be here, and who at worst is the second-best jungler, and now maybe he’s even the best — that seemed like a really good gamble to take. If you know Quid, he’s a very fun-loving, very affectionate guy, and I think he would have struggled with someone like Inspired, to be completely honest, whereas with Jose they get along quite well.

So it was more of a culture fit. That’s not a knock on Inspired — I’m actually more of an Inspired person myself, a little more firm, a little more direct. But when you build a team you have to take those things into account. Me and Core bring enough seriousness to the team; you throw Inspired in there and there’s a chance we’re all depressed. Whereas Inspired does well with some fun-loving people too — Saint seems to be a very good opposite for him. So everyone ended up where they belong, and hopefully we have two good teams.

Do you believe that right now Jose is a better jungler than Inspired?

Yeah, honestly, I think Jose is the best, maybe even player in the west, to be completely honest. Watching this guy play scrims — and I’m sure if you talk to anyone else — there are like four or five champions where, if you give him those, he will just completely fucking 1v9. Obviously Qiyana and Lee Sin, they’re the two big ones, and there are a couple of others people will tell you about. He’s on another level when he gets those champion picks.

Last time we spoke, your goal was the Worlds semifinals. A few months later you’re LCS champions carrying your region’s hopes. Do you worry the team peaked too late, or that the pressure could get to your players?

The pressure definitely can get to people. We came into the year with a lot of pressure, we didn’t perform, and then we figured out how to deal with it. But as you said, this is a different kind of pressure now — especially in NA. We know this is our home Worlds, and Team Liquid never made one. We made it now. Last year the expectation would have been “oh, just get through Swiss, that would be great.” Now you hear people talking about potential top four, maybe top six, maybe if you make quarters but you get the eventual winner, then you can rest your hat. That’s what people are talking about with TL now. So is there pressure? I’m getting a little bit of goosebumps — of course there is, it’s Worlds. But this is why we come here. We want this pressure, we want to feel the environment, and we hope we can perform to the expectations we’ve set for ourselves. We’re doing everything we can in practice to do that and having a lot of good conversations around it. Am I 100% confident? No, you never can be. But we’ve done the work, so we have to take that into Swiss.

You haven’t broken through that international ceiling with this team yet — unlike LYON with Inspired, who can lean on good performances against these teams. Do you think that’s a disadvantage?

Yeah, absolutely it is. Having in the back of your mind that you’ve actually beaten one of these teams, while you’re playing and it gets a little bit hard — that’s an advantage. But it takes one. We just got to get one on the board, whoever it is against. We need to win against a quality team, and everyone knows who those teams are: the top LCK, LPL, or a G2, something like that. You get one of those and then it looks good. And some of our wins do look pretty good — looking back, we took out KC quite handily, and KC ran through play-ins very, very easily, and their EWC afterwards was actually a very good EWC. So we beat a team that was actually very strong. History looks favourably on our wins, and quite kindly on our losses too. So we’ve just got to keep riding some of that momentum and continue to work our asses off.

Last question. Your contract with TL expires at the end of the year. Have you given much thought to what comes next — could this be your last run with Team Liquid?

Actually, no, I don’t think it’s going to be my last one. I think we’ll go again, we’ll see — I’ll let Dodo share any news if he has any. But from my perspective, going into this year I thought it would be my last one. It just looked too perfect: I had a really good roster, I knew I was going to win at least one split, Worlds in NA. But I actually enjoyed this year maybe more than I thought I would, because I didn’t enjoy last year all that much. This year has brought back a lot of my love for coaching. I’m healthier, I’m in a better headspace. I’d love to go again, to be honest.