After relegation from ESEA Advanced in season 44, Team 7AM made the decision to part ways with founding member 1Knas. One season later, they’re back in Advanced and have now brought in Olly “husky” Gollings, reuniting him with in-game leader Oscar “LVN” Levin after the two played together on Feenix and EKO. Tom “tomtom94” Coles sat down with LVN to talk about EPIC, the team’s ups and downs, and the new season of ESL Premiership.
How have you found EPIC so far?
It’s been good. It was a rough setup yesterday with the internet outages, we didn’t really get to set up too early and had to set up later. Apart from that it’s been smooth, it’s a really nice place to be – different to Kettering a bit, but also the same as well. Even the summer vibes in the smaller hall than the bigger hall at Kettering, it’s still good. And there’s aircon, there’s four aircon units right behind us. It gets pretty hot during the game, but as soon as we’re done go stand in front of the aircon and we’re all chill again.
Are you the favourites to win?
Personally I’d say we’ve got a very good chance. From an outsider’s perspective, some people don’t give us the favourites, which is deserved a bit because we don’t always show up in UK events especially, and Europe’s been a bit mixed. I’d say with how practice has been going, implementing husky who we’ve had about a month with now over the player break, it’s looking good for us and the few events we’ve played, it’s looking good for the future.
How is husky settling in and what does he bring to the team?
I’d teamed with Husky before for two years before we had a year “hiatus” going our separate ways after ex-EKO disbanded, so we knew exactly what we were getting with Olly [husky]. Essentially all we needed was a second star player to just come fit in the roles we needed to, put in the time to learn where he needed to play and just go shoot pretty much. Let everyone else worry about everything else, we just needed that firepower in the team and so far he’s doing that, so it’s going well so far.
Is there anyone that you don’t want to play here at EPIC?
Not really, it’s going to be fun no matter what, especially the two mixes, Neighbours and the “Saudi mix” I’ll call them I guess [Al-Fatiaq]. They’re going to both be quite loud. I really want to play Neighbours, because I’ve lost to them before at previous EPIC.LANs, both with mixes, so it would be good to see how I do against them with a team.
You worked out that my next question was going to be “who do you want to play” so that’s helpful. Do you think it’s fair to say your team have had a bit of a tough run since Fragadelphia 17 last year?
I think the main thing that Fragadelphia did, that was right at the start of the team and it set kind of a high bar, we were literally one map away from beating EG [Evil Geniuses Black] and then going to the upper bracket final of Fragadelphia, which was pretty huge and then… I think going from that, we’ve just been relatively normal, nothing special in terms of not doing deep runs in qualifiers, top five UK team just around that part all the time, sort of stagnating.
That’s what made us do the roster change of having 1Knas since the start of the team to then looking different, we just thought we’d plateaued a bit so we thought “what should we do for the future” and made that decision. We’re hoping that takes us to the next step, we don’t want to be stuck at that mediocre level, we want to take that next step.
How did 7AM as an organisation support you while you were making those changes?
They’ve been amazing, even the organisation owner, he’s played in CS teams back in the day so he knows how they work. He has his opinions, but at the same time he fully trusts any opinions we have and any decisions we make he’s fully supportive of them. It’s the longest I’ve ever been in an organisation, I haven’t ever been in an organisation longer than six months before and it’s never usually my fault or my team’s fault, it’s usually just them folding, I don’t think any organisation I’ve been a part of up until 7AM is still around today, it’s been quite unfortunate. 7AM have been unreal, even from this event, the stuff they’ve brought, the content they’re doing, shows they’re different from other orgs.
You’ve developed a bit of a reputation for scouting great players who then get poached, do you think that’s fair and how do you react when you do lose players?
I guess this is going back to the previous team that I’ve been in for two years, you had Mad who got picked up by Viperio [then FAMBIT] at the end of it, cryths was already sort of up there. Then obviously JamieG was sort of the big one who then vanished from the UK scene, no comment further about that [laughs]. I think I do put a lot of time into keeping an eye on players in the UK scene but also in Europe. I just watch loads of tier three in our own division, I just watch teams, I see an interesting result or I see a player’s playing well and I say “let’s watch his POV this game”. I’m looking at players, even now I’m not looking at them for now, I’m literally just watching to see what they do, but I have these players in mind all the time.
I’d say after building the first team which was me, Husky, Mad and JamieG, how long we stayed together and what results we got from nothing, then having to rebuild with a completely different four including me, getting back to the same level and looking to go further this time – I’d say it probably wasn’t a fluke, it’s a fair compliment to make.
You’ve been somewhat outspoken about the changes to ESL Premiership for the Autumn 2023 season, are you worried that they’re going to hurt the scene as a whole?
I’d happily be wrong, but I feel like what’s going to happen is… they might change how many teams get into play-offs, or how many teams come from the BYOC qualifier game, but all that’s going to happen really is the top UK teams, they get fully funded and paid to go, versus any team that can afford it or any mix that just turns up to the event and is good enough to win out. It’s not going to be the best UK competition at that BYOC qualifier, because Insomnia don’t deserve it. It’s stupid prices, you’re paying full LAN price for a one-day qualifier, it’s just ludicrous, they don’t deserve the money to go to the event.
All it does is it stops teams getting the play-off spots, allegedly only teams in play-offs get to keep their spots for next season so that stops any team that had a spot, if they can’t get top four in the qualifiers then they can’t keep their spot for next season, and it stops teams that should deserve play-offs because they can’t afford to go. So yeah, it’s not good.
What would you like to see changed, either for this season or next season?
How they should do it is not as many teams, only the teams in play-offs that are fully funded to go, like it was before. [Editor’s note: ESL Premiership ran a 4-team LAN finals until 2020, when it was cancelled due to COVID] But they won’t do that, because Insomnia doesn’t make money from that, so it’s a void partnership. I feel the whole reason why they’ve done it is Insomnia realising people aren’t going to their events any more, and it’s shown in the past two after that disaster [i68, which was plagued by server issues], no sympathy for how the first event since COVID was run. And it’s shown in the next two events where no-one wants to turn up or play the events. So they’ve tried to do this, to literally force people to go, because we have no choice other than ESL Prem in terms of league. And it’s a Pro League spot, so even if teams aren’t happy, it’s a Pro League spot on the line, we have to play. So it’s a very bad position to put teams in.
Last question, have you recovered from Arsenal’s bottle job at the end of last season?
[laughs] Yes, I suppose you could call it a bottle job. That was a tough two months, I got relegated from Advanced around that time as well, so it wasn’t a good period of time. But this summer’s been very good, good transfers, looking forward to next season.
