Team Liquid takes down Cloud9 and proving nothing stops TL from 4th place.

On the 24th, Team Liquid defeated Cloud9 and secured their place in the semifinals. Surpassing the 3 consecutive bans against Impact in the top lane, Team Liquid proved that the team is not a one man team. In consideration of everyone on TL playing phenomenally, one player stands out. The player who received MVP of the series, Doublelift. Doublelift managed to not die once while dealing the most damage in the series.

After the game against C9, InvenGlobal interviewed Doublelift. Let’s see what he has to say about C9, TSM, and SKT T1.

¤ How do you feel about your win today?

I feel like the games today were pretty close honestly. Could have gone either way. C9 was a really good opponent. They had the same strengths in the regular season, but they didn’t fix any of their weaknesses. This is why we were able to win.


¤ What do you think are the clear weaknesses are for Cloud9?

They don’t know how to play around objectives very well. C9 commits too many people or they do not commit enough. Sometimes C9 would start dragon or a buff when the enemy is coming their way. C9 is usually not ready to fight because they are trying to finish dragon or finish blue. I think C9 played around their top lane a lot with Gnar or Fiora to snowball hard top lane. Licorice is a rookie player, so he doesn’t know how to play. It is really obvious when he is getting 2v1 by Impact. When Impact is getting ganked non stop, he is still ahead of Licorice. I think they should have played around mid and bot. Maybe tried to snowball the more stronger and experienced players. They just didn’t change their playstyle.

¤ Who gave the call to end the game backdoor in game 1?

Firstly, dragon came up so I told Pobelter to keep pushing while we stall dragon 4v5. Since I am playing Caitlyn, I trapped off river. I think C9 was playing a bit scared. They didn’t want to take the 50-50 on dragon. The game in essentially on a timer. In 30 seconds, Ryze is going to hit the nexus. C9 had to make a decision of whether they want to force a fight or finish the objective. I think at a certain point it was too late for them. At this point, Pobelter told us that he thinks he might be able to end. I responded by saying “Okay, we are going to stop them from basing.”. We weren’t really in an offensive position. The enemy had to make a decision, and us reacting on their decision. However, C9 did not make a decision. I think that is how we won the first game. C9 was too indecisive.

¤ What are your general thoughts on giving opinions to a call that may not be right?

I think on a team you need someone who is aggressive and someone who is looking for those crazy unexpected plays. Then again, you also need someone on your team that says “Wait, we don’t know where their jungler is or they might have tp up first.”. Someone that is able to say “Why can this play go wrong.”. If it is too much of one or the other, you are going to have a bad team. If you never make a play, it is bad. If you are always going to make a play, you will throw. I think it is good to have a balance. I believe I do do a good job in making aggressive and defensive calls. Maybe some players are more specialized. For example, Olleh is more specialized in the aggressive calls. For me, I am more 50-50. This is why our team is so good. We have a mixture of game knowledge.


¤ So do you think TL, at this moment, has a good balance in the 50-50?

In the C9 series, we definitely threw a lot. The one gank when we tried to get the Tahm Kench. Ezreal got double buffs, and it really snowballed after that. That one moment looked really bad for us. Other than that, I think we have good balance. We know when to engage. When we do have an advantage, we really know how to push that advantage. In this series, I think we did a really good job of slowing the game down. Even when C9 was really far ahead, we didn’t let them do Baron or take our inhibitors.


¤ What do you think are the differences between TL now and TL in week 3, 4, and 5?

I think we were just able to resolve conflict in our team. Early on, noone wanted to give each other criticism. This is because we were afraid of hurting each other’s feelings. When you do give someone criticism, most of the time you are giving them criticism because you want to win. If everyone wants to win, they should want the criticism. They should want to hear stuff from their teammates such as “Oh what do you want me to change or how should we change our play?”. I think after a while we just thought “Okay what we are doing isn’t working.”. We just started to talk about what we are doing wrong. Us as a team was able to talk to each other without hurting the team. I think that was really important to us. I believe that was when we actually started to get better.

¤ Talking about tomorrow’s game, who do you think will make it? On top of this, who do you want to face in the finals?

TSM is going to win 3-0. I mean, I would love to play Clutch in the finals because they are the worst team in playoffs. But also, I want to play against TSM for the crazy TSM vs TL finals. I think TSM vs TL finals will be really fun. In general, I would like to play TSM. In my dream, I would like to play against Clutch or Echo Fox.


¤ If the finals was TL vs TSM, what do you think the score will be?

I think it will be 3-2 actually. Us and TSM are both really strong.


¤ Going back to the question we asked you in a prior interview, are you satisfied with your fairly safe performance? Or do you think you need to play a bit more aggressively?

I think I just look less aggressive now because I played on TSM. On TSM, everyone played really p**** (laughs). Sometimes on that team, I would engage as the ADC. On this team, there is so much fighting already. It looks like I am playing really passive, but I don’t need to really start any fights. I watched a lot of LCK recently, and I think it is also really important for the ADC to never die. Dying gives the enemy gold obviously but when you play AD, your team plays a lot around your item spikes. When you die as AD, you delay your item spikes by 1 minute or 2 minutes of farming. That could be the difference of losing a Baron, inhibitor, or a team fight. I think I just got better over time I guess. I just don’t die as much. If I get to play at Worlds or MSI, I really want to see how I perform against Pray and GorillA. Uh, I don’t think Bang and Wolf will make it to MSI (laughs).