For Liazz, the peak of his career came when he finished in the semi-finals of the StarLadder Berlin Major with Renegades back in 2019. Four years on and now with Grayhound, his career hasn’t gone downhill, but it certainly has become representative of the struggle faced by teams from the Oceanic region.
Following elimination from the IEM Cologne 2023 Play-In, we spoke with a dejected Liazz about those struggles, facing jet lag, and the potential avenues that could be taken to both catapult the team and reinvigorate struggling regions.
A tough time for you guys here in Cologne, what went wrong for the team?
It's the first event of the season, and you know, you don't really know what to expect when you get into the server, everything can be good in practice and it just doesn't translate. I think we have a better idea of what we want to do in practice following this, but I think it was a lot of fundamentals. Communication was really bad the whole event, maybe we weren't hitting shots as usual, but I think you can't really control the shots that you hit but you can always control communication within the team so that's going to be our focus going forwards.
You played two teams who both made two changes before the event, does that change how you prepare for those games?
Maybe a little bit. We didn't do a crazy amount of prep or anything. I'm going to give you the same fucking bullshit answer everyone gives in interviews, but it is the start of the season, and any team in the world is going to tell you they're going to focus on themselves so that is the truth; we did just try to focus on ourselves but obviously not the right areas. But yeah, it's a little bit weird trying to figure out where players play on the map, and if they're a smart team and we don't know positions, and they mix those up and mix up names, it's all really confusing. Yeah... it definitely doesn't help us, but it definitely doesn't help them either.
We've spoken before about the need for you guys to play these EU events and be in EU more; Complexity and EG are now planning to spend the majority of the season here in Europe, is that something you guys will be looking to do as well?
I just don't think it's financially possible for us. Plus we just have random qualifiers pop up in Australia, you know? We can get a week or two weeks notice and it's just a bit cooked going through the jet lag. For Americans, it's a ten hour flight or something, but for us, it's 25 hours plus. To make that transition and dealing with jet lag constantly and always playing at 50% because of it, it's just too much. We just have to take it as it comes, try to bootcamp here and there whenever we can.
What would help you guys in that sense?
More tournaments. Playing online tournaments while we're at the bootcamp so we don't get match nerves when we're at a big event like Cologne. We want to get that out of the window. For us, we haven't played an event with our full roster since Dallas, you know? That was a month and a half, two months ago, so it's hard for us to be 100% confident going into a match. Maybe it's a little on us, our routine and prep and everything like that, but, it's just cooked. We need more match time.
Someone on Twitter floated the idea of your region combining with the Americas to play a league like Pro League used to be, would that help?
Oh yeah, definitely. I played in that system in 2018 and 2019 with the Renegades boys and it was great, you know? We had constant league matches in America, all the American teams were flourishing, the scene was thriving, everything was great, but, COVID just ended that. I think people are just a little timid to move back into America right now because there's no teams because everyone left. There's a lot of South American teams that want to move and be living in America and in South America, so it would help them, American teams, I know Americans aren't the biggest fans of living and playing in Europe so they'd love it as well, and for us in Australia, it makes things easy as well. It helps with jet lag. It would be a great idea for us, it would be a great idea for America, but it's just down to if you want the league to make sense, you need top teams in the league, and it's down to the top American teams to decide they want to do that and it's kinda tough, I understand they want to be playing with the best, living in Europe, a team like Liquid is majority European now so why would they want to move back? There's a lot of things that go into it but I'd love it if that happened.
On Renegades you had jkaem, is that something the Australian scene needs to consider, bringing European talent back in and maybe forming with some NA players if they struggle to make another top team?
Maybe, I mean, we considered it, but I don't really think that anyone on our roster doesn't deserve their spot right now and also, it's tough for a European player to decide to move all the way to Australia because they'd be there for half a year when we're playing tournaments and shit there. It was a little easier when we were living in America, maybe that can happen with different teams moving to America, different teams would be built and superteams would be built, that could be cool. But, talking about our issues now as a team, the big thing for us would be a European, hard-hitting coach.
In terms of getting a coach then, is that something you guys have spoken a lot about?
We talked about it a little bit. Money is always an issue, it's hard to pay these guys what they want, they're pretty smart and they know how much they're worth. But, you know, it's also about trying to find the right coach for us. We have different personalities in our team and it's about trying to find someone who would fit that. I don't know, I've played with a number of different teams and a number of different environments, so I'm okay with whatever, but it's a whole team discussion and everyone has to agree on something and we haven't really found a person that we 100% want just yet.
You can qualify for BLAST through the Showdown, is that something you guys have already given a thought to?
Yeah, if there's no schedule conflicts for us, then 100% we'd be looking to do that. BLAST is a sick event, sick TO. We've thought about it, but we haven't really heard, or I haven't personally heard details about when the qualifier is, so I can't really say.
What would it mean for you guys to get to play a BLAST event and get that extra top level tournament?
It would be awesome. Every event helps us a lot. The experience of it all and just getting gametime and matchtime is fucking huge for us. It really would mean a lot, but again, it just comes down to schedules.
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