Despite a good start to the tournament,
Team Liquid has now been eliminated from First Stand 2025, narrowly missing out on qualification due to head-to-head scores. After the heartbreaking loss, toplaner Jeong "
Impact" Eon-young and AD Carry Sean "
Yeon" Sung sat down in a press conference to discuss the issues that plagued the team, their match against Hanwha Life Esports, and the future of the squad.
Impact, what did you learn from First Stand after facing all regions?
Jeong "Impact" Eon-young: "The biggest point for me is that I need to work on my champion pool. As a team, we need to be more efficient at macro and delegating responsibilities on the map while spreading ourselves in the right lanes.
TL was the first team eliminated—what lessons are you taking from this, and how do you plan to use Split 2 to improve?
Impact: Throughout this tournament, I felt like we lacked teamplay, and that also comes down to individual gameplay. I have a lot to work on and room for improvement. All the practice from January to March didn’t really pay off for us. We have to capitalize on all the practice we can get until MSI.
With picks like Quinn, Kassadin, and Ryze, do you feel like Hanwha Life Esports disrespected you?
Impact: I don’t believe they picked those champions to disrespect us. Korean players are always serious about the game, and all of those are viable picks. In all three games, they had good reasons for their choices. Specifically for Ryze, they completed the comp with Kayle as the last pick. I was expecting Vayne, so that surprised me. When you think about Kayle, she really depends on the mid-to-late game, and once she gets there, it’s basically over. My plan was to cut her off and stop her from scaling, but I got outplayed. So instead of disrespect, I think it was just a normal win condition for them.
Yeon, what happened in the first game? You had an advantage, but Hanwha Life Esports turned it around.
Sean "Yeon" Sung: I think I scaled pretty well, but from my perspective, the enemy comp had very exploitable weaknesses. In the end, we just couldn’t open up a teamfight fast enough—we were always one step behind.
Many teams had to adapt their playstyle compared to their regional leagues. Lin "Creme" Jian mentioned how the removal of lane swaps impacted them. Did you face any difficulties adapting?
Yeon: As a team, it wasn’t a big deal for us. Besides gaining a little extra advantage, CoreJJ (Jo Yong-in) and I are very solid in botlane in terms of champion pool and laning phase, so I don’t think we had much trouble adapting. If I had to give an example, our Kalista-Nautilus game against Top Esports’ Varus-Neeko was a bit less familiar to us. With lane swaps, we didn’t see much Neeko, but without them, she’s much better now.
How did you feel about the bot lane matchup against Park "Viper" Do-hyeon? You played against two world champion ADCs—what did you learn from that?
Yeon: My read on them was very accurate, so I’m glad I had a good idea of how they played beforehand. They’re completely different—Viper is very clean and solid, while JackeyLove (Wenbo Yu) is super aggressive but makes mistakes, though he’s really good at what he does. I think I learned a lot, especially about playing more on the defensive side.
Lastly, any words for TL fans?
Impact: This tournament left a lot to be desired. There was so much more we could have shown, but not being able to perform—I am very disappointed in myself, and I’m sorry to my teammates. That said, we’re not going to falter like this. We’ll have the right mindset, push even harder next time, and do better. Nothing else to say except that we have to play better in the upcoming season.
Yeon: We’re very sorry to the fans for the disgusting performance we showed. Even though we can’t promise we’ll do better, we’ll try our best."
Header Photo Credit: Christina Oh/Riot Games
