TSM Kevin: "If we were to spend a year in Europe, we could honestly upset a lot of teams"

After pulling off a major upset against NRG, TSM fell to Team Vitality in a clean 3-0 sweep in the Upper Bracket Semifinals of the Esports World Cup group stage. They will now drop to the Lower Bracket, where they will face the winner of FUT Esports and Shopify Rebellion for a chance to qualify for the playoffs.

Following this heavy defeat, Kevin "Kevin" Ameye joined us for an interview to discuss the loss, their upset victory over NRG that he considers as the biggest upset in RL history, and how much his team is limited by their inability to regularly scrim against top teams.

Kevin "Kevin" Ameye: “The first game, we were just feeling things out a bit. And in the last two games, we just got a bit nervous and were rushing everything. That's the kind of pressure Vitality enforces. It makes the other team panic a lot because they'll just 50 the ball to their teammates, and then they just starve you of boost a lot. They're really good at starving the enemy team. Our corners were basically just a desert, so it was hard to invade them too. They bump a lot, so it was tough, but it was a good learning experience.

Kevin: It felt good to win against NRG, we watched them a lot, so we were going in confident. Not egotistical, but we felt like we had a chance of winning because we watched them a lot. It felt great because they're the world champions, and it was my first time playing them. I had to win, so it felt even better. But I feel like they weren't really playing to their potential because we watched them play and we know what they're capable of, it still felt great to win.

Kevin: If you watched the gameplay, it didn't really look like it, but yeah, probably the biggest upset in Rocket League history.

Kevin: It feels great, especially being part of TSM and doing it as well. I used to watch a lot of TSM streamers, so it feels good to make the org proud as well. So yeah.

Kevin: Yeah, pretty big. They're the favorites to win. And their kickoffs are actually... they look like robots when it's the kickoffs. They look like they've prepared really well. They seem like the most prepared team here, in my opinion.

Kevin: It feels good, especially being in the French crowd. You can hear the commentators too, and it feels nice to understand it. I like the hype around the French crowd as well. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Kevin: It's whatever to me. I don't really mind that nobody knows about it because I don't really speak it anyway.

Kevin: It's kind of annoying, especially being from a region where there's not a lot of competition. There are two teams that we can get scrims against and actually progress from. We can scrim across regions too. We can scrim Oceania, but a lot of them don't really want to scrim for some reason. And with the Middle East, the time difference is pretty rough because Sphinx (Nik Aiman Hakim Bin Nik Azhar) has school, and the Middle Eastern teams usually scrim pretty late at night. So it kind of hinders our progress quite a lot. Because if we were to spend a year in Europe, we could honestly upset a lot of teams. But they get to scrim every day, so it's kind of hard. But we're doing the most we can. We're doing a pretty good job at keeping up. So yeah.

Kevin: Just trying to show everyone that our playstyle works, and that we're not just some bumps from Asia. I just want to win. It looks like a far reach, but we're pretty confident that we can beat basically any team. So we just have to put our minds to it. If we play confidently, the upset potential is always there.”