Recently I managed to have a chat with Connor “Sliggy” Blomfield a guy with a long history in the Counter Strike scene playing with a range of teams from Crack Clan to Infused. Now days he is the coach and CEO of EZSkins.com and working as a freelance CSGO observer and Event Technical manager. In this Interview I spoke with him about the rise of the new power house team EZSkins and how they have had such a dominant performance in the short life span of the team.
In this first part of this interview we discussed the team’s performance at I55, DreamHack london qualifiers and talked about the offline event and the upcoming offline finals of the recent Gfinity CSGO cup.
Starting with I55, first time that you guys as a team came together to play at a LAN event, how did that feel and what were you expecting your outcome to be?
yeah we felt pretty good, Me and Henry kinda set the team a goal to cram as much prac in as possible within the month before Iseries, aim for gold and the boys came on top. I would say we kinda expected it, we knew the talent was there and we gave them a good base, it was just if a month was long enough to become the best within the uk.
During i55 you guys had a hugely dominant win only dropping a single game through did that settle any nerves you’ve got going forwards and how did it feel in general?
I had some nerves personally, but only due to my lack of being involved as much as I would of liked within the team. Obviously with it being the first month of the launch of the site aswell as the team, I struggled to commit as much time as I would’ve liked. The team however was beyond confident prior to the event and every time they talked about i55 it was as if they had already won it.
Going forward I feel that if they can be the best in the UK within a month then we can now focus on the euro side of things, maybe get some more maps down in the near future and at the very least put up a good show vs some bigger names
How do you feel in general about the move to the NEC for iSeries, and is it going to have any affect on the UKCS scene?
Na it won’t have any effect. I’ve worked at a few events in the NEC before, I quite like it as a venue, I feel like hotels close by will sell out pretty quickly so thats always a factor in my mind but UKCS wise it hopefully won’t have too much affect. My main concern is the fact CSGOlounge didn’t show the final, this may have more effect on future sponsors putting money for the prize pool, but I guess we will see when december comes around.
You managed to get through the qualifiers with a hugely dominant performance, how do you feel that’s set you up for the upcoming weekend of playing against some of the best teams in CSGO currently?
I think there is a big question mark on how we will perform. We havnt played against some of these names since 3-4 years ago when it was CS:Source. I think it will be a good to see how much work needs to still be put in, and get a good gauge of where we stand when it comes to the best teams in CSGO. The UK scene in general used to be as good and in alot of cases better than alot of the top 10 teams. Im confident we can get there, its just more of a question of when.
How have you prepared for Dreamhack London?
I dont even think we have prac’d since I55. Josh is on holiday, but he does come back soon so we should be able to get a few solid days in before Dreamhack. Its a Bo1 format which frankly suits us down quite well as we arnt the strongest on set maps. Not that thats an excuse!
Starting against Envyus’ still rather new line up, how do you think you will be able to handle the first game?
Yeah somewhat chucked in at the deep end, but it will do us good. We know they are very strong, if we get a good map, we should be able to hold our own. I feel like we can win, you should never go into a match thinking you can’t win, otherwise you have already lost. It will be a good learning stage for us, we are gonna focus on our own game and see how well we hold up.
Who would you rather play against in your group for your 2nd game of DHack London?
In the second stage I would rather play Renegades. They are top lads and I feel like it would be a really good game. Apart from ‘jks’ i feel like individually we are better players, they are just quite drilled and they do alot of research into other teams which could serve us quite being quite a wildcard within the group. That being said I would be happy with Dignitas also
Next up for you guys post Dreamhack London is the finals of the Gfinity cup going up against Infused, who you knocked down into lowers of the i55 finals. Being the only team that managed to take a map of you during the i55 run, how are you practicing and getting ready for this game?
We arn’t really focusing on it much at the moment, its been moved back a few weeks which probably helps them a bit with all their roster changes that are going on. We will have a good 2 weeks practise before then though, so hopefully be alot more drilled than we were at Iseries. The map we lost that map to them was literally because we made more mistakes than them, both teams played pretty bad. They have some good players and will give us a good game. Hopefully our after plants will be a bit better and George ‘Zed’ Butter Bear wont get as many clutches this time!
