GL Harpoon: "We should be treated as favorites going into EMEA"

Despite suffering a heavy defeat against Solary in the LFL final,

Galions

remain undeterred. The French league’s second seed is set to face in the EMEA Masters playoffs this Monday and will aim to progress as far as possible in the tournament, with the title—and qualification for the EWC EMEA Qualifier—firmly in their sights.

For his second European competition with the organization, the team’s AD carry, , remains optimistic about their chances of success. After defeating in the group final and ahead of the playoff stage, which will unfold over the course of a month, he spoke with Sheep Esports to reflect on the stakes of the competition and the team’s start to the season.

Franciszek “Harpoon” Gryszkiewicz: “We bounced back after the disastrous finals that we had, and I feel like we are going in the good direction. We are winning a lot in scrims lately. The officials that we played in EMEA Masters were against really bad teams, but we played really well, except for the game 2 against UCAM. Overall, it's looking way better than in regular. I think Omon (Šimon Říháček) plays really well right now. I feel like he wasn't performing at his best in the regular split of the LFL and in the playoffs. But since EMEA Masters started he is playing way better.

Harpoon: First of all, I played really badly in the finals. It never happened to me. I felt good in games and stuff like that, but I just played really badly. I didn't feel like they were playing better or anything. I just felt like we were playing worse. It was a completely different story than the finals against KCB from last summer, where I felt like they were actually a really good team and they were playing really well and swept every team in the EMEA Masters, even the Los Ratones. This time, I don't feel like will be the big demon in EMEA. I think it wouldn't be even surprising if they drop out. Probably they won't, but I wouldn't be surprised. It's for sure different and I don't really know what happened, because even when we were 0-2 down, I felt like we could still reverse sweep and it just depends on the game 3 if we are capable of winning it, taking lead and closing it out then we are actually capable of reverse sweeping but we fucked up with like 8k gold lead I think.

Harpoon: I think it was probably, especially for me. It was the worst day I had in terms of gameplay in like one or two years. Even the next day, I went solo queue, and I felt like I was playing well again. It wasn't really affected by stress or anything because I felt like we were not stressed at all.

Harpoon: Yes, for sure. I don't know how people see us, but we should be treated as favorites going into EMEA. As I said, I think the only teams that we should not be favorites against could be Misa Esports and Solary, since Solary beat us two times already and Misa is a really good team as well. I think other than that, we should be heavy favorites going into every other game. But in the end it's a really long tournament where there can be a lot of changes in meta and stuff like that. It's also best-of-three, so it could also depend on the form of the day, as what happened in the final. I would never say that we are a worse team than Solary. We just had a really bad day. Of course these things can happen, but if we avoid the bad days, then we should be the heavy favorites for the competition.

Harpoon: I wouldn't say favorites but for sure the tough opponents would be and overall I think the Prime League is looking way better than LES. So yeah it would be G2 Nord, maybe , maybe , one of those teams. Other than that, I don't really feel like the teams are that scary. We played against the top four of Spain, and they looked really weak, and Barça had already dropped. And I just feel like the overall level in Spain right now is really, really low.

Harpoon: Yeah, for sure. That'd be the biggest reward. I think that at this point, people would blindly just take the top 2 without winning EMEA if they knew that they could qualify for the EWC. It’s mainly to play against LEC teams because I don't think anyone from ERL is actually aiming to win the qualifier. It's possible, but it's less likely. The biggest thing is you actually get to play officials against the LEC team, and you get to scrim with LEC teams probably more often because of that. So that's pretty good for the rest of the split. The only thing that is bad is that most of the teams, especially the ones that didn't win the league, didn't get a break or anything like that. So for example for us, we won’t get a break of more than two days from January to probably June. It all depends on schedules.

Harpoon: There are some specific things that we already started working on before finals, and it looked a bit better. Because even in the finals, I felt like even with game 1 and 2 that shouldn't be playable, we went for like 40 minutes or something like that. And we were actually not trembling when we were like 10k behind. We were actually still playing the game, and enemies could troll, so we could take advantage of it. But overall, for sure, it's more team-wise. I feel like we are playing way better as a team than at the beginning, and sometimes even when someone is not playing well individually, I feel like as a team we actually try to make plays, and that's how we win the games.

Harpoon: I felt like I was the best ADC in the league. I felt like we were the best botlane in the league as well. Aetinoth and played really well in the finals. I actually respect what he did on X because he didn't back off from the trash talk, which was really funny. To be honest, after going 0-3 in these finals and seeing the tweets from Aetinoth, I kind of smiled a bit because it was a pretty funny tweet from him. So I respect him a lot because of that. Pure gameplay-wise, I think 3XA is playing terribly this year. So he's not even in the competition. Maybe it's support-dependent as well, because last year he looked pretty good. I wouldn't say he was playing really well or LEC level, but he was probably one of the best in ERL. But I think it comes down to support because with Piero, he had a really good synergy and with Targamas (Raphaël Crabbé), they have a really bad one. It's probably between Aetinoth and me. But I would never say I'm worse than someone that I'm competing against. So I would just put myself at the top.

Harpoon: I think trash talk is really good as long as it's not cringe. What I mean by that is that for example, there are players like Rin (Khalil Sahraoui) who always type in all chat but not even in a funny way. He would die and type “XD”. It's not even funny. It's more cringe and in terms of like, tweeting before the game, when you type something funny, you’ll have the pressure on yourself that if you lose and you fuck up, then people will laugh at you and it will backfire. That's kinda what keeps me going because you are just putting extra motivation and extra pressure. It's always good for me. I feel like I'm performing way better when I'm under pressure than when it's just a normal game.

Harpoon: No, for sure not. I don't feel that way. When we play scrims against ERL teams, I feel like I'm really good for the ERL level and I don't feel like I'm far from LEC. I would say, yeah.

Harpoon: For sure it's an objective but the main goal is to actually do good this year with Galions. Because if I do well this year maybe I will have some shot for next year. But right now the objective is to qualify for the EWC Qualifier, to win the EMEA, win some LFL trophies since I went to the finals two times in a row but I didn't manage to win it, and also going for the World Cup by the end of November, if I'm getting selected to the team, I think that's the biggest goals and then we will see what happens. But for sure, playing in LEC in the future would be great for me and I feel like I'm ready.”