Photo by Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games
In the wake of a loss to the defending world champions, Karmine Corp head coach ZE1SH offered some unfiltered honesty that can be expected from him. He described a match marked by uncharacteristic mistakes, said there’s more work to do, and that he himself was frustrated.
“I was tilted as f***, to be honest,” he told Ult Orb in his press conference following the match. “So I need to even improve more on controlling myself towards this.”
The loss, a 2-1 defeat to NRG, came at razor-thin margins. A 13-7 win, 13-11 loss, and 13-9 loss meant that the teams won the same number of rounds throughout the entire series, but ZE1SH took nothing away from his opponents.
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“Of course they are a really insane team, nothing to remove from them or anything, but I also felt like we could have fought better earlier,” he said.
The root of the head coach’s irritation originated from seeing his team not playing like their usual selves. Days before, KC dropped just nine rounds in a clean 2-0 victory over Xi Lai Gaming.
“For the players, I said earlier today, there was a lot of things that we usually don’t do, so I hope they’re going to learn from it,” he said.
ZE1SH said the work to fix KC’s issues would start immediately after the press conference concluded.
“After this talk, we’re going to have a discussion because we need to, and we need to bounce back from it,” he said. “It happens, to lose, you know? As I said, you can’t sleep [in a] room of mistakes. Part of life.”
Despite his criticisms of his own team, ZE1SH made sure to give the NRG players their flowers.
“They are really insane team, you know?” he said. “They are world champs for a reason. And today, they punished us a lot on our mistakes. So we just need to get better on a few points.”
Karmine Corp and ZE1SH will fight to stay alive against Nongshim RedForce, this year’s Masters Santiago winners, in Group D’s Decider match. The match will take place on October 3 at 5 a.m. PST/8 a.m. EST, or 8 p.m. local time.
