cadiaN : "We leave with a lot of pride and dignity about the way we played"

Astralis  came into the Fall Final in controversial circumstances due to their addition of Casper "⁠ cadiaN ⁠" Møller as an emergency sub, and their debut against  Vitality  with the Danish IGL was far from ideal.

They bounced back by giving  Spirit  a run for their money in their second match, however, and  cadiaN  said he and his team can be proud of their showing.

"It gives a big boost to know that we can implement the style that we have tried to practice for a very limited time in an important game,"  cadiaN  stated.

After their loss against  Spirit ,  cadiaN  also spoke to HLTV about bouncing back from their day-one demolition, the future of the team, and  Astralis ' plan with the double-AWP setup.

Today was a much better performance than yesterday. How did you bounce back from yesterday's loss?

I think we talked about the circumstances surrounding the current tournament, with all the talk and all that stuff, and we tried our best to manage it. But Vitality are also a really good team with a lot of structure, so it was of course super difficult to play a good game versus the number-two team in the world when you had such little practice.

When we watched Inferno, there were a lot of marginal situations that I think we could have overcome. A 1v2 in the pistol round for us, a 1v1 between me and ZywOo in the first buy round, device 's 1v1… There were a lot of chances, we also attacked ZywOo when he was alone on the site in a 5v4 with the AWP, and he was just making ZywOo things.

So it wasn't as grim as it looked, but I think today was way more similar to how we've shown ourselves in practice. I'm really proud of that and it also gives a big boost to know that we can implement the style that we have tried to practice for a very limited time in an important game.

You're eliminated without appearing in front of the home crowd. But considering you played two top-five teams, what do you take away from your first event in an Astralis jersey?

That we are very close to being at the top, and also very far on some maps at least. I think that we leave with a lot of pride and dignity about the way that we played and the way that we handled ourselves under pressure.

I'm very excited to get started with this team and bring in more drills, more tactics, and more philosophies. You can feel the fire inside of everyone that this is the team that we are going to move forward with and one that we believe can win trophies.

I also wanted to ask about your transition to a rifler, considering we saw you employ the double-AWP setup quite a few times on Dust2 and Mirage. Is that something that you want to move forward with, or will you pick up the rifle more?

In practice, we didn't use the double AWP as much because I wanted to get used to rifling rounds. For me, having ten or more years of experience with AWPing, taking the double AWP is not going to be that big of an issue.

So it is something that we're going to implement. Maybe today, I sometimes bought the AWP a little too much, so that's something we'll have to evaluate. But it also worked, we had many good rounds with it, so I think it would be silly not to utilize the potential of me and device AWPing together.