G2 BABYBAY: “We hit the panic button a little too hard after London”

After G2 Esports lost 2-0 to LOUD in the Americas Stage 2 group stage, Andrej "BABYBAY" Francisty spoke to Sheep Esports about the team's performance, their recent role changes, his transition between agents, and areas in which G2 still need to improve if they are to progress further in the competition. Despite the heavy 13-1 defeat on Lotus, he believes that G2 can learn from it, particularly after LOUD dismantled one of their strongest maps with an unfamiliar Chamber-Neon composition.

Andrej "BABYBAY" Francisty: "It sucks to lose, but they exposed us a little bit on some stuff. We have to learn from that because losing 13-1 on Lotus, that's one of our best maps, is really rare for our team. Clearly, they had a really good game plan to dissect us, so that was brutal.

BABYBAY: Definitely. We knew they were good. A lot of these teams are starting to play Chamber, and when they have a good Chamber player, it's hard to deal with right now. qck (Gabriel Lima) has really found his form with it. His Operator has gotten much better, and I think that has helped him quite a bit. He was playing Chamber before on some maps, but I don't think his Operator was that great. Now that he has that in his toolkit, he's really hard to deal with.

BABYBAY: After Santiago, we changed to a Vise-Harbor-Omen or Harbor-Astra type of style, with really defensive compositions and stuff like that. Then, after London, we swapped me to the main duelist role. We tried that out with me playing Neon and things like that. After the 100 Thieves game, we kind of swapped back a little bit, putting me on more Chamber and Vise while jawgemo (Alexander Mor) went back to the main duelist role. Those were the main changes we went through, and I think it was for the better. Even though we lost today against LOUD, I think we're still in a really good spot.

BABYBAY: The thing is, I'm confident no matter what. We had a talk when we lost in London and kind of bombed out. The team wanted me to go in the direction of playing the main duelist because they thought maybe my communication and pacing would be more controlled. But it was tough. I was telling them that I was really stressed out. It was really hard. I didn't get signed to the team as a duelist player. I filled the duelist role for Santiago playing Waylay, but that's much more like Jett. It was a lot more natural. I never really played the new version of Neon that much.

I played the old version, where you had two stuns and the slide, but slide accuracy wasn't really a thing back then. So I never really got the training to get those slide kills. Back in the day, when you got slide kills, it was basically RNG. It was really random. Now there's actually a skill component to it. I was stressed thinking, “How am I going to get as good as jawgemo with these slide kills?” Even then, it wasn't terrible. We had some close games, and the first kill/first death stats were decent.

It was just those moments where you need to be a crazy Neon player like jawgemo or t3xture (Kim Na-ra). I wasn't ready for those yet. I didn't have that in my bag, and it wasn't natural for me. If we had continued going down that route, I would have had to learn that. But we figured maybe we did a little bit too much overcorrecting after London. We hit the panic button a little too hard. So we reeled it in a little bit, and I went back onto Chamber. Like I said, I'm pretty confident. I'll do whatever the team needs me to do. That's kind of my job here.

BABYBAY: I think it's because I have a really good Operator. I would rate my Op really highly in the league in general. You're able to save the economy and have an Operator for most rounds, so I think that's a big part of it. I also have some really good positioning and micro that I use to try to get free kills here and there. Obviously, there are a lot of really good Chamber players, but I think my little niche is finding gaps in what the enemy is throwing or showing and getting those first bloods.

BABYBAY: The crazy thing about the character is that even when you use utility against him, he can still get a kill. Maybe you flash him and he just shoots. I think I had a couple of kills today where I was smoked off; I just went for a shot and got a kill. They can't really do anything about it. So yeah, that's a big part of what makes the character so strong.

BABYBAY: At least on Sunset, I think that was on us. On Lotus, as I said, I don't think we were going to win that map the way they played it. They had a really good game plan. We had never played against a Chamber-Neon composition like that, with double lurks and everything. That was a new one for us. I know KC is running that composition, and they're one of the best lower-tier teams in Europe right now, so it's a really good comp.

We've never played it and we've never played against it. It was really difficult, so I think no matter what, we were going to lose Lotus. Now we're going to learn a lot from that loss. But Sunset? Man, I think that was just on us. We were up 12-10. I don't know, we were just in our own heads and overthinking things. We had a 5v5 to close it out and we just blew it at the end.

If I'm being honest, that was just a choke. I'm not going to discredit them, though, because they had to make the clutch plays to bring it back from a 5v5 and take it to overtime. I think the biggest thing we need to work on is figuring out these moments when we're up like that. We need to close them out and make sure we're making calculated plays. Don't take too many risks in those moments; just play the numbers advantage. When we do that, I think we're one of the best teams in the world.

I get asked these questions internationally, like, “How come G2...?” I think it's because of how we lost that Sunset. That's also something that falls off internationally sometimes. We forget about these disciplined moments that we need to be playing, and it ends up coming back to bite us. So yeah, we should have closed out Sunset. I think they take Lotus no matter what, and then at least we would have seen on Haven who the better team was on map three. They're also a good Haven team, so it would have been nice to see that play out.