oskar: "It doesn't affect us when we lose the first map like that"

cs cases free2025-04-21 10:49:446

Tomáš "⁠oskar⁠" Šťastný talked to us following MOUZ' triumph over FaZe in the quarter-finals at DreamHack Masters Stockholm, shedding some light on the team's controversial Cache pick and how his team recovered from it.

MOUZ are now in the semi-finals after beating FaZe 2-1 despite getting off to a poor start in the series, losing their own pick, Cache, 1-16, as they came back with 16-11 scorelines on Dust2 and Train.

oskar shared mousesports' reasoning behind picking Cache

We sat down with oskar to find out what led MOUZ to picking Cache, what went wrong on the opening map, and how they recovered from the dismal start to the series:

Let's start with Cache and your decision to pick it in the first place - what made you start playing Cache and why did you pick it in this match?

We started practicing Cache before the break, we had it as a pocket pick that we thought should work against these teams, like Astralis or FaZe. After the break, we played it maybe three times and we felt good on it, we won those practice games, at least, so we used it now, but nothing went well for us.

We had a bad start and we didn't win any of the clutches, we had a chance once in the round where Chris killed me, and if we had won that round we would have probably had more rounds as CT, but it didn't work out. It was a bad match.

What was the morale like after Cache? Were you able to just shrug it off and move on?

We took it as warmup (laughs), we warmed up a little bit. We don't really have issues with someone destroying us like that, we're mentally strong and it doesn't affect us when we lose the first map like that. We then start from scratch on the second one and no one really thinks about what happened on the first.

Did it help that you got off to a good start on Dust2, as well?

I think we played structured, most things we wanted to do worked, we were just calm and focused. We weren't afraid of losing because of what happened before, it just pushed us forward and everyone was even more focused.

Towards the end of Train it was looking like FaZe could bring it back and it ended up being quite a close match until you won some close situations, including your clutch, what was the ending of the match like from your point of view?

It was similar to Dust2, the start didn't go as well on Train, we didn't have such a big lead, but we ended up taking the first half to 10-5. We knew we had a strong T side and that we could defeat them, which we did. The clutch, that was a bit lucky, I just went out of the smoke at the right moment when karrigan turned his back on me.

North or Na`Vi in the semi-finals - any preference?

I think it doesn't matter. Na`Vi beat us the last time we played them in the playoffs, I think, it might have been the StarSeries final, I don't remember where exactly we played them. We'd probably prefer them so that we can take our revenge for last time.

How confident do you feel now that you've proven yourself more with a win over a team like FaZe, especially after struggling against MIBR in the groups?

That kind of a win will help us mentally and in-game, everyone should be a bit more confident now. I think we'll show better Counter-Strike than we did in the groups, where it was all about Robin and suNny, who helped us even get out of the group.