VIT Chronicle: "In those two weeks, we made an insane amount of progress from being one of the worst to becoming one of the best"

From a team that needed to rely on GIANTX to secure a playoff spot to one now qualified for Masters London in the span of just a single week. After defeating Team Liquid on Thursday, Team Vitality followed it up with another major performance on Friday by overcoming Fnatic, securing their place at the season’s second international event through a run to the upper bracket final of VCT EMEA, where they will face FUT Esports.

Following this historic victory—the French organization’s first-ever win against Fnatic after nine consecutive defeats—Timofey “Chronicle” Khromov spoke candidly about the match and the difficult weeks that preceded the long-awaited results.

Timofey "Chronicle" Khromov: “Insane. Obviously it was a high stakes match, you couldn't really expect anything and also this type of result as well against Fnatic I think that it’s something that wasn't really expected. On the first map we did a kind of a stomp and on the second map we did an insane comeback that was maybe not expected against Fnatic because obviously it's something that you maybe expect from Fnatic, to come back from crazy scores, but this time we did it.

I'm obviously super happy, maybe not for myself. I always exclude myself from those things, but I'm always happy for my teammates and the team overall, just because I know how much work they did, how much work they put into the stuff, like right now for the past week as well. We changed a lot and it worked out, thankfully. I'm just grateful to have an opportunity to play in another Masters tournament right now.

Chronicle: For some of my teammates, like PROFEK (Dawid Święć) and Jamppi, it’s actually not something that is really unique because they were beating us when I was with Fnatic in the previous year. And I think they were maybe very emotional, not just because of the fact that they beat Fnatic, it was more about qualifying to an international VCT tournament. PROFEK didn't do it once in his career and Jamppi obviously did it, but really early with Liquid. And for them it was actually more about that, I think.

For me, maybe I would just say that it was more like revenge because I actually think I never beat Fnatic in my career, like even on Gambit days. Obviously we won a practice against them or two or whatever, it doesn't really matter there. But on the actual official I never beat them, there were always some rough scores, unlucky stuff happening, I remember in 2021 and 2022. But right now it’s the first time beating them, it just gives maybe more confidence than usual, it's actually insane. It just relieves you because you beat a great team, you found the key on how to punish them for their stuff and it worked out. Obviously, you can maybe also blame them, maybe not performing super well or like maybe something happened to them that they couldn't provide some insane gameplay against us, but I mean honestly that's VALORANT sometimes; that's esports in a nutshell. You just cannot really always put on insane performances day after day, unless you're obviously Vitality CS, but that's another example [Laughs]. But yeah, this is kind of a crazy result for us.

Who else I didn't speak about? Maybe Derke (Nikita Sirmitev), because obviously last year was rough for him. This year, for us all, wasn't the easiest year because we had to manage; we had to pull a lot of stuff, again, as I said previously, a lot of work. And yeah, obviously he was super happy. He’s a big reason why we did so well today because he was super good in terms of his individual performance, first of all, and also in terms of team play. He was super connected with everyone, and we were building insane game plans against them. It is basically the reason why we won.

Chronicle: After three losses in the group stage, we finally fully realized what was the issue, and we knew the key already for that because the stuff wasn't really that hard. I will just explain it super shortly. Our system, especially on the defense side, was crumbling a lot. If you can look at it stats-wise, we were one of the worst defense teams by a margin. That was basically because of us not really understanding what were the pros and cons of that system, because in practice we were doing super well. We were consistently beating almost every single tier 1 team and putting great results. But when it comes to officials, maybe because of pressure or stress, it was just quite tough to pull out the same stuff that we were doing on pracs. And it's not like I can call it, being scared to play the game. No, it was just more about that we were struggling to think in the game. Because like the solutions to some of the moments in the game were coming easier in the practice rather than officials. So this time we changed it.

We decided to put more work on the defense side in terms of building more structure into it, building proper reactions, protocols around our actions on the map. We changed a lot of ideas on our current strategies. And obviously it was very hard to pull for those two weeks we worked because obviously it started after we lost to BBL. So it was kind of almost two weeks of work. But in those two weeks, as you see, we made an insane amount of progress from being one of the worst to becoming one of the best. Maybe you can say that some luck is included. I'm not gonna lie, luck is included almost everywhere. But also a lot of work and stuff we did is insane.

Chronicle: I didn't mention it but actually yeah. I wouldn’t say it was a critical issue, but everyone just needed to start speaking less. It's really good that in our team almost every single player by nature is a great speaker and actually can talk in the game no matter how much pressure we have but sometimes you have to trust IGL and coaches vision fully and just let them speak more rather than giving your thoughts and ideas. At some point you might overwhelm them with this stuff and we just believe that this is our vision right now, we need to stick to it and nothing else matters. If it won’t work out, it won’t. We will work more on it. If it is as you see right now, we qualified now, so yeah it’s good.

Chronicle: I'm not really sure about the negativity towards us since the start of the season. If we consider the start of the kickoff, first of all, we had a stand-in (Bartosz "UNFAKE" Bernacki). We need to understand that, not every team is able to pull out insane stuff while playing with a stand-in. Especially if it's a stand-in for a player like Sayonara (Ștefan Mîtcu) who is individually super skilled and also brings a lot to the team. The whole team was built with an idea of having exactly him on the roster with his mindset and his mentality. It's not like it was built around him, but the team was built with him in mind.

Obviously UNFAKE is a super great person; he also brings a lot of great stuff in our team and gives us some cool experiences that we never had. But you need to understand that we should not expect a lot and we still did top 5. I don't think it was necessarily a super bad result by any means. We were almost one or two steps away from qualifying to Santiago, even with such circumstances, so it was okay.

But I will fully understand what people were maybe disappointed with us on Stage 1 was that we didn't deliver a lot during those games. That was also because we believed in one system and it just didn't work out. Sadly, this is just kind of the life of an esports team or players. Just because you're trying one thing and it just doesn't work out and it takes weeks of changing something, trying to find solutions. Sometimes those solutions are not coming that easily. As you see with us, only after four games, we actually figured out what was the real issue behind all those things and finally figured out what is exactly working for us.

So right now, can we say that we delivered those expectations? Not really, but also there was one good phrase that I like: “For the people who expect a lot, their expectations are kind of their problems.” It's not necessarily true because every team has to perform. That's their main job. But obviously I also don't like when our team is called a super team or that we are in need of performing super well because not everything is guaranteed to be fair.

The common thing for us is just like that we are living in the unknown because maybe everything can be ruined because of one bad day. Maybe it's something that has happened today for Fnatic. Maybe they were unlucky today. They had a very bad day and lost their first chance to qualify for London. Now they have to go through a hard way. Maybe something happened and the enemy team pulled a great place against you, they were really prepared against you and they actually did the game well. You can put it in terms of maybe luckiness or their preparation was better. Again, there's a lot of things that you cannot really control as an esports player.

I will just end up on this, for me the experience with Vitality was insanely good. Like because I found a lot that wasn't really visible for me in Gambit or Fnatic and it was a super good experience. It made me stronger.”