Hampus Abrahamsson · @SPRATTEL_lol
23rd Aug 2016 from TwitLonger
Breaking down past split and whats next~
First of all, thanks to all the support and waves of energy being thrown at me and the team during this roller coster split. You guys deserve to hear something from someone who was on the team/near the team and this will be my attempt to just "explain" why we derailed so hard.
So, uhm, where do i start?
Basically, from my perspective, it ultimately came down to a spider web of problems all connected to eachother in one way or another. We had our times of, well, brilliance on our stage games. We would straight up obliterate some teams by simply playing our own game and just stick to a gameplan/winning condition and executing it pretty damn good. But we were inconsistent and one dimensional while having an overall weak read on the meta throughout the split. Some of the analysis i heard was pretty fair and on point, one being we had a good start because we are strong individual players and we knew how to snowball leads. The problem was that this was the one trick we knew as a team. Again, we would have games where we actually won because we were good (our "upset" win against G2 comes to mind where we as a team created a snowball by doing good plays and not just individual snowballing) but it happend far to infrequently.
The biggest problem, in my opinion, was our practise. We kept doing the same over and over, destroy early game, snatch a <25 min nash, finish game, repeat; which works perfectly fine in scrims but never goes the same on stage. So sure, if we went on stage and grabbed an early lead we would just scrim it out and win convincingly 9/10 games. I mean, thats how we practised basically every day so we should be damn strong at it. Some players in the team raised concerns and were unhappy how we practised, feeling like it was useless practise. By the mid-season, we got blacklisted from numerous teams in the league because they too felt the practise was meaningless. Probably shouldve been a wake-up call, in hindsight.
So as the split continued, week by week, said spider web was expanding. Poor drafts caused mostly due to bad read on the meta, the meta shifts in general, other teams improving at a much faster pace, ourselves going nowhere. Everything was slowly starting to boil for us, trust issues in-game, people feeling more safe and confident than reasonable, you name it; we had it.
Eventually we saw ourselves facing relegations. Noone on the outside thought we would have to be even remotely worried about it but we were very split within the team (not necessarily on a personal level, im still on good terms with everyone on the team, but on a professional level it was split). Frankly and sadly, everyone knew it was our final days as a team, not a single one in that room believed we would stay together as 5 no matter the outcome, but we still gave it our all, let that be known.
So, there it is, a brief explanation on how we as a team just collapsed completely. Its obviously more complicated and you can go much deeper and break it down but i prefer to leave it at this.
Further on, id like to apologize to not only those who support me, but also those who support Schalke for this past split and what we did. I wish nothing more than no matter who represents Schalke next split in the Challenger Series does a better job than we did in LCS this split and bring them back for the summer split. That being said, im still contracted with Schalke and will sit down and discuss the future for myself within the team in the upcoming weeks.
My goal for now is to make it back to LCS one way or another, its been a great 2016 for me as a player, ive improved more than i thought was possible, which makes me think theres still so much left to learn and do to become a greater player; and i think i did a fine work brushing off that nasty promisq-taste people had in their mouths from 2015 summer. I hope to come back, and show what ive learned and what theres left to give and remember, theres always a 2017 guys.
THANKS!