Starting things off on the second day of the Group Stage matches of the 2020 League of Legends World Championship, Team Liquid has faced off Machi Esports. Favored to victory, the team was upset by the  PCS representatives, after showcasing promising results in the Play-In Stage. Nicolaj "Jensen" Jensen, Mid Laner for TL, has joined Inven Global for a post-match interview.

Let’s start things off by talking about the Play-In stage. What are your impressions about your team, what are strong and weak points?

Our strengths are that we usually have very good teamwork, but as for weak points, I think our biggest weakness is that we are not super proactive in the game. We tend to draft a lot of scaling compositions as opposed to snowball, so we are kind of playing the game on hard mode

You told Jeesun in the LCK broadcast interview you wanted to be sorted in Group A. What about Group B seemed scary?

Well, I completely forgot who is in Group B now…

DAMWON, JDG…

DAMWON is one of the favorites this tournament, and JDG looks very strong from what I have seen, even though I haven’t seen them on stage yet. Look A looks slightly easier, even though it’s not actually easier. They definitely seem more beatable.

TL came in as the favorites today, but PCS seems to be a little bit underrated. What do you think about that?

We just don’t know so much about them because we haven’t watched that many of their games, but they are for sure very underrated.

Let’s talk about today’s game! The drafting seemed to not be very helpful, but was there anything else lacking?

I think we had an advantage in the Bot Lane, but we were not able to snowball or utilize their lead at all. Our Top and Bot Lane draft needed to snowball ahead for it to be worthwhile, but we were unable to do so and that made the game really hard.

After I died in lvl 3, it was pretty much over for me. I could never really get priority, or be able to do anything in my lane at that point. Drafting Orianna was a bit of bait, we knew they had a high priority in the champion, but then they picked a strong ganking jungler with Syndra and were able to snowball the game from that gank on me.

Changing the focus from today’s match to overall how preparation has been going, how have scrims gone for you lately?

It’s been pretty good. We struggled a bit against the best teams, but overall we are not a team that does particularly good in scrims usually. We had some expected difficult games, but overall we stack up very well against the middle-of-the-pack teams. We are doing a lot better here than we were in NA.

"We usually have very good teamwork, but as for weak points, I think our biggest weakness is that we are not super proactive in the game"

Changes in Team Liquid this year: TL had a bit of a shaky start in Spring, but you guys have picked up momentum since then. What were some of the biggest challenges that the team had to overcome this year?

We needed to be more in sync together, play more on the same page. Oh man, Spring was just a disaster, with so many things that went wrong, but we just learned to play better together as a team, having a better grasp on the meta.

The biggest thing was to just stop straight up inting. So many stupid deaths and bad individual play. We picked things back up during Summer and played better.

What went into making sure that Team Liquid was more cohesive? Was it just in-game practice?

We worked more together as a team, and the inting stopped. We had so many disaster early games during spring, where we just would not know how to play our match-ups, so we just kept being snowballed. We stopped sumping and became better individually, had conversations about how we could do better as a team.

And where would you rate Team Liquid right now?

It’s hard to say. We had a disappointing day and I am not very optimistic. We can definitely compete with the teams in our group, we just need to have some stability. We did well in Play-ins, but it’s different in the Group Stage, so we just need to be consistent and know how to use our leads a little bit better.

And my last, but most important question… Have you watched Ovilee’s WAP cover yet?

Unfortunately, I did, yes.

Unfortunately?! What do you mean by that?

I was just kidding… it was an interesting idea for sure...

Looking for more Worlds 2020 coverage? We got you.