“Personally, I’d love to face T1 in the finals once again.”

On day 8 of the 2022 LoL World Championship group stages, Gen.G advanced to the quarterfinals of the tournament as the 1st seed of group D. They forced a tiebreaker against RNG by winning their last match against them; using the momentum from that victory, Gen.G beat RNG once again in the following tiebreaker match to advance as 1st seed.

After the day ended, Inven Global spoke with one of the coaches for Gen.G, Won “Mafa” Sang-yeon. He first provided an update on himself and the coaching staff, who are currently in quarantine due to testing positive for COVID. He also provided how the team picked up their momentum in week 2 in comparison to week 1.

“Everyone’s suffering due to the effects of COVID, but we’ve gotten a lot better. As for our team’s performance, I don’t think we’re back at our 100% just yet. We can definitely do better. We got complacent in week 1 when it came to our drafts, so we focused on improving our draft for today [day 8]’s matches.”

Chovy shared in the broadcast interview that their head coach, Score, told the team to change one of their bans to Seraphine against 100 Thieves. Mafa was careful in sharing information about Seraphine, as it was directly related to Gen.G’s game plans,

“Although [100 Thieves] did lose against RNG, they proved that Seraphine was a very real threat against them. As for where we think she’s at in terms of champion tier in the meta, that’s unfortunately information that I cannot disclose at this moment.”

Gen.G’s quarter final opponents are none other than DWG KIA. Gen.G has never lost a series against DWG KIA in 2022; it’s almost as if fate brought these titans together to clash, this time on the international stage. Mafa commented,

“The LCK and the LPL do look to be stronger than the rest, so I expect the matches to be very close between the two leagues. As for us, we always played a full series against DWG KIA throughout the season, so while I wouldn’t be surprised if the series went to five games, my hope is to beat them 3:0.”

Mafa also shared his thoughts on what he hopes for the rest of the knockout stages.

“While I do hope that we get to face DRX in the semifinals, we get to face EDG should they lose. It’ll be nice to get revenge against EDG for our loss against them last year. As for the other side of the bracket, T1 does look like the strongest team, but the other teams in the bracket are also very strong teams. I expect the matches to be close as well, but personally, I’d love to face T1 in the finals again.”