TACO: "We weren't ready to play on day two"

Our next interview from ESL Pro League Season 5 Finals is with Epitacio "TACO" de Melo, who shared his thoughts on their poor finish to the group, the tiebreakers, and today's quarter-final against mousesports.

SK started the group with three convincing wins versus Cloud9, Immortals, and fnatic, but ultimately finished Group A with a 3-2 record, dropping one-sided matches to G2 and Envy.

TACO felt SK got complacent on day two

Winning one of their two mr3 tiebreakers against fnatic and losing the other to Envy, SK secured third place in the group and thus a spot in the quarter-finals.

Read on to find out what went wrong for Epitacio "⁠TACO⁠" de Melo and company on day two, as well as his thoughts on the tiebreaking format and the upcoming quarter-final battle with MOUZ: 

The first day went really well for you, 3-0, three very convincing maps, but then on the second day, everything fell apart and you lost to both French teams one-sidedly, what changed?

Maybe we didn't prepare like we did for the first day. Also, G2 and EnVyUs are two great teams. I think we kinda lost our focus or something like that, because we thought that a 3-0 was enough to go to the playoffs, but it was a lesson that we're gonna take to the next tournaments.

Do you regret having left Cobblestone through instead of Cache against G2, or is it more about mistakes that you made in the match?

We didn't know how G2 play Cobblestone, we never watched them play it, we knew that they are really good on it, but also we feel really comfortable to play Cobblestone. We chose Cobble because of their gamestyle, we think they're really aggressive and on a map like Cache it's easier to get kills being aggressive, while on Cobblestone you need more teamplay or passive actions. Now we know that they're very good on Cobblestone, but it is one we're very comfortable on as well.

Similarly in the EnVyUs match, such a tough loss on Inferno, what made it so one-sided?

I think the veto was not good for us, we had to choose between Cobblestone and Inferno, and like I said, Cobblestone is a great map for us, maybe better than Inferno or on the same level at least. But the thing is, we know that EnVyUs is having good results on Inferno in EPL, they almost beat FaZe if I'm not wrong. We chose to play Inferno because we're really confident on this map as well, but in the end - of course it's easy to say this now - Cobblestone would have been better or us.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you've played these tiebreakers before with the mr3's, what do you think about the format?

I don't care about the format, when we accepted the invite and when we signed the contract to play the tournament, we just have to accept it, play and shut up. Of course we can give our opinion, but during the tournament it's not fair. If we knew that the format was going to be like this, we just have to play and that's all.

In theory, would you rather have 16k startmoney in the tiebreakers rather than 10k? That seems to be one of the most criticized things about the format...

16k would be better for the CT side, but like I said, I really don't care.

Going over to playoffs, you now know you'll face mousesports who secured second place in Group B, what do you make of the match-up?

We're gonna be ready for tomorrow, we weren't ready to play today but tomorrow we will play with 100% focus and we're gonna watch more, veto better, we're gonna do everything we didn't do today. It's gonna be a hard match, mouz is a good team, they showed they're doing really well, but as favorites I think we're gonna win.

Epitacio 'TACO' de Melo Age: 22 Team: SK Rating 1.0: 0.97 Maps played: 436 KPR: 0.64 DPR: 0.64 Cloud9 #12 Jordan 'n0thing' GilbertTyler 'Skadoodle' LathamMike 'shroud' GrzesiekTimothy 'autimatic' TaJake 'Stewie2K' Yip Envy #25 Christophe 'SIXER' XiaCédric 'RpK' GuipouyAdil 'ScreaM' BenrlitomVincent 'Happy' SchopenhauerAlexandre 'xms' Forté MOUZ #15 Tomáš 'oskar' ŠťastnýChris 'chrisJ' de JongChristian 'loWel' Garcia AntoranDenis 'denis' HowellRobin 'ropz' Kool SK #3 Gabriel 'FalleN' ToledoFernando 'fer' AlvarengaMarcelo 'coldzera' DavidEpitacio 'TACO' de MeloJoão 'felps' Vasconcellos G2 #4 Richard 'shox' PapillonKenny 'kennyS' SchrubNathan 'NBK-' SchmittDan 'apEX' MadesclaireAlexandre 'bodyy' Pianaro fnatic #11 Olof 'olofmeister' KajbjerDennis 'dennis' EdmanRobin 'flusha' RönnquistJesper 'JW' WecksellFreddy 'KRIMZ' Johansson Immortals #14 Vito 'kNgV-' GiuseppeLucas 'steel' LopesHenrique 'HEN1' TelesLucas 'LUCAS1' TelesRicardo 'boltz' Prass