After Spirit secured the EWC Championship with a 3-1 victory over FUT, the team's rifleman zont1x gave an interview to pley.gg. He discussed his feelings about facing FUT, his current role within the team, and his thoughts on the map pool for the finals.
Q：So, zont1x, this is your first time facing FUT. Can you tell me which aspects you think they performed well in during this final match and what challenges they posed for you?
zont1x: We were actually quite nervous since this was the final. The first map (Cache) was really tough because we hadn't prepared enough for it, and they played really well and were in great form, so they kept it close against us. But we managed to pull it together later on and ultimately secured the win.
Q: If you could have played more matches against them before this final, do you think it would have helped?
zont1x: That would certainly help.
Q：Did they come up with anything unexpected during the match?
zont1x: No, at least not for me.
Q: So how do you feel about your personal performance in this final match?
zont1x: It could have been better, but I feel like I was more focused on doing more work, trying to manage more communication, the commands needed, and the timeouts, rather than paying too much attention to my own personal performance.
Q：Are you saying you have concerns about your performance?
zont1x：I have no concerns about my personal performance because I've always directed my energy and focus elsewhere.
Q: So you're trying to help the team as much as possible instead of just staring at your own crosshair?
zont1x: Yes, it depends, but most of the time, when I feel the team lacks communication, I speak more. For example, during mid-game calls, I try to make as many mid-game calls as possible.
Q: To me, your team played with more discipline than usual—at least in my view. You anticipated many pushes. Do you agree?
zont1x：I would say that many of these teams, like Legacy, FUT, B8, they play too aggressively because they aren't the typical first-tier teams. I'm not saying they're bad, I'm just saying they have a different style, since they haven't been playing at the first-tier level for very long.
Q: Following up on this, it seems your team overall prefers to play highly structured CS. I'm not sure if you agree, but beyond winning matches, is it important for you to play CS beautifully? For you, is playing CS well more important, or is winning more important?
zont1x：Obviously, people judge you by results. No one really cares how you win—if you grab a consecutive championship, honestly, who cares (if you played beautifully)? But we definitely didn't play our best CS today; we could have played better. We also know we could have played better, and we made many mistakes.
Q: Despite these mistakes, do you still think you deserved the win against them? Because the match was really close, and some might say you won a lot of clutch rounds while they were actually the better team overall.
zont1x: We indeed won many clutch rounds, but we also made many stupid mistakes that we would never normally make. So yes, maybe they deserved to win too, but what I'm saying is, it's just because you happened to play all the maps of the grand finals on the same day. If we had played 50 maps instead of 5, I bet we would have won more maps than they did. So are you judging based on today's performance, or overall?
Because overall, I think we should have won. But who cares who "should" have won? Anyway, in the end, we won. I think they were very tired, and after Ancient, they were a bit tilted and mentally shaky. By Nuke, they basically couldn't perform. So, those were three very close maps, and then they got exhausted.
Q: Assuming they take Ancient, how do you think that Mirage match will play out? Do you have good tactical strategies for that map? Are you confident you can win it?
zont1x: Yeah, I think there's no issue. Those maps are actually entirely their maps—we have Cache, Ancient, Nuke, and… what were we playing again? Cache, Ancient, Nuke, Anubis, right. I would say Anubis as a whole is a pretty weird map, and then Nuke, Ancient, Cache are all maps they wanted to play. So they definitely have an advantage in the map pool.
Q: Were you surprised that they chose to ban Dust2 instead of Nuke? I thought they would ban Nuke.zont1x: None (not surprising).
Q：Makes sense. I actually wanted to ask you, since you've now won both trophies, how would you compare this trophy with Major?
zont1x: Can't compare, but at this current point in time, I think the Major means more to me than this trophy.