- Na'Vi head coach B1ad3 talks about electronic being tried out as the team's IGL temporarily.
- Electronic had called the shots for Na'Vi on Mirage and Overpass in their first few ESL Pro League S13 matches.
- Boombl4 took over the role of IGL completely following 2 consecutive loses against Gambit and FURIA.
Natus Vincere’s head coach Andrii "B1ad3" Gorodenskyi in a post-match interview with ESL spoke about the team’s recent decision to try out Denis “electronic” Sharipov as their in-game leader. Na’Vi did not have the best start in the group stage of ESL Pro League Season 13, one of the reasons behind this was an ongoing experiment by the team where electronic was calling the shots on both Mirage and Overpass, instead of Kirill “Boombl4” Mikhailov. B1ad3 talked about this topic and tried to explain the team’s intention behind such a move, and what they intend to achieve from it in the future.
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Na’Vi coach on why electronic is the IGL on some maps
Electronic is not performing up to mark at the currently ongoing CS:GO tournament, but this may not entirely be his fault. The 22-year-old Russian entry fragger who has never acted as an IGL before in his life has started taking on the role of the team’s IGL on certain maps like Mirage and Overpass.
He currently holds an average HLTV rating of 1.08 across 12 maps with a K-D of +9. While this may seem fair enough it is far below electronic’s potential, mostly because he had been busy calling the shots for his side in the server for the first few matches. Talking about this, Na’Vi head coach explains why they implemented this bizarre change out of the blue.
“We were trying in practise giving the role of IGL to electronic on Mirage and Overpass, and it worked, it was fine in practice. But when you are playing LAN or official matches, there are always different reactions and decisions from your opponent(s).
In practice, people are usually trying out some executes or some other stuff, so it did not work really well actually in the first official maps. We knew it could be like that, and it is not electronic’s problem for sure because he also has no experience of being an IGL, and he is not IGLing at some ‘tier-3’ event, this is the EPL and teams are very experienced here.”
Na’Vi did go back to Boombl4 taking over the role of the IGL permanently after they lost back-to-back matches against FURIA and Gambit. But according to B1ad3, Na’Vi might try the same again in the future if there is a chance. This time, however, Na’Vi are lucky to have barely made it into the playoffs all thanks to MIBR, who pulled off a solid ‘2-0’ victory against Cloud9.
The community is not too happy about this experiment that Na’Vi is trying because they think it might hinder with electronic’s natural game, limiting his overall performance and affecting Na’Vi negatively. Boombl4 so far seems to have done a good job at calling the shots, surely he is still a bit inexperienced but shifting the load over to one of their star players does not seem like a viable solution.
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