Fnatic surprised the world by defeating SK Telecom T1 in the group stage of the 2019 LoL World Championship. By taking advantage of early mistakes, Fnatic snowballed their lead to secure their win. After the game, Gabriël “Bwipo” Rau joined Park Jeesun for a quick interview about their match against SKT and CG.

Congratulations on the win. By taking down SKT, you got your third win of the group stage. How do you feel?

Very happy. Momentum is strong for us. It was a very convincing win for us. We were satisfied with the draft, and we were able to execute correctly, so we're very very happy.

About the previous gaming against Clutch. Did that game make you guys step up?

It got all the jitters out so everyone felt more confident against SKT. The game itself against SKT was still very difficult. It's only thanks to their mistake, the dive in mid lane where we were able to break up the game. I think it helped everybody understand when and how we want to fight. Every time we went mid, it was smooth because we had such a long game with so much fighting. We were so much used to it, so every time we went mid we ran with them and tried to catch them and kill them.

It was a good confidence boost because the game came down to execution, and we all felt that the draft against CG was very difficult to play because we had three mobile carries against a lot of slows and CC, but we still were able to pull through a win.

Fnatic pulled out Shen in the top lane and no ADCs for Rekkles. But things changed this time. What made you come back to that style?

Late game power was something we were lacking and we felt like every game in Group C has been very late game. Ultimately, the better late game comp has been winning or at least the games went to a point where if you had a good scaling comp, you would be able to 50/50 the game, have a fair chance to win the game.

So we felt like playing mages bot for early game pressure with the global from Shen for example, was not as good as playing the scaling carries like Xayah, Gangplank. Just trying to stay in the game, just taking a 5v5 fight because that's how all the games have been ending in Group C.

What's your mindset going into the RNG game?

Similar. Just make sure we have much scaling, because even if the early game is tough, we feel like a 5v5 will happen at some point, and we just need to make sure we have the right champions to play a favorable 5v5. It's just execution-based because it looks as all the fights now are execution-based and the team with better mechanics and better play are winning the fights. Just making sure we have a good scaling comp.

We're not worried about laning phase too much because it doesn't feel that advantages being created by the teams in the laning phase are substantial enough unless there are huge mistakes. A bit like SKT this game, they made a very large mistake. They gave up too much and the game ended early. We were confident that our scaling was strong and we should just play out the game.