MAD Pad: “I think one of the biggest issues that Rogue has is that they always want to look for the safe play”

Once more, the MAD Lions make their way into the LEC finals, reminding the rest of Europe why they are the defending champions. MAD defeated Rogue in what was perhaps the most tense and nail-biting 3-0 series in recent times, and they now await the winner between the Rogue and Fnatic match.

Thank you for accepting this interview and massive congratulations on the 3-0 victory and making the finals again. Let’s start it off nice and easy, how did you see this series against Rogue and what were your initial expectations going into it? Did you expect a 3-0?

Pad: Probably not 3-0, no, but we were coming in expecting to win the series. I think our players were really feeling it today and it’s always nice to beat Rogue! I think this series must have been probably one of the most fun series this year from a spectator point of view, I could imagine. As a coach, watching it from the backroom certainly felt like it.

Game 1 was obviously very one sided for us and a pretty clean and convincing win. Game 2 was a game of heart-attacks that we always deliver with a short ranged team composition that has to go into a long ranged composition and be really decisive, which we were. And Game 3 was the classic ‘be behind 10.9k gold’ I think and make a comeback. So it was a very exciting series but we were not expecting a 3-0, we expected maybe 3-1.

Marek “Humanoid” Brázda also said 3-1 when I spoke to him. I think Mac mentioned on PL that Rogue are a fairly predictable team, so I’d like to ask where there any special preparations before facing Rogue?

Pad: So my primary job is scouting opponents, doing scout reports and thus scouting on Rogue. I would say that – without giving away too much info – that we had two approaches going into Rogue and we knew both approaches would lead us to victory, and when that is the case, usually the enemy team will have a very hard time playing LoL.

I think something has to change for Rogue. Right now, if we can prepare two different approaches and both of them are winning approaches against them, I think it means Rogue’s playstyle is too set in stone in regards to how they approach the game.

That’s fair enough. In that regard, you mentioned Game 3 with the massive gold deficit comeback. I spoke to Humanoid and he mentioned teams in the LEC don’t know how to play past 20 minutes. I’d like to ask then, does the meta somewhat suit MAD in terms of you guys picking scaling, waiting out the early game and score on the big objective fights? Does early game not matter as much now?

Pad: I think early game matters a lot but Humanoid also has a good point. Teams don’t know how to play post-20 minutes and so that means that even if they generate very large gold leads in the first 20/25 minutes, if you don’t know how to play LoL then it’s not very useful.

A lot of the time, the game is going to slow down a lot and what Rogue did in the game was they were permanently showing on three lanes or as five in one lane. They gave us so many opportunities to pull the trigger. I think one of the biggest issues that Rogue has as a team is that they always want to look for the 80-20, 90-10 or even the 100% safe play. I think that mindset is a losing mindset, it slows down the game to the point where it makes it easy to find openings to get back in the game against them.

I think the early game matters a lot and you see whenever we play the game, when we get an early game lead or get the first herald, we break the top tier 1 tower and then we start rolling the snowball. When we get an early game snowball, we don’t slow down. We don’t stop. We don’t stop just because Baron spawns and I think a lot of teams slow down when Baron spawns, and I think that is a big fix needed for EU moving into Worlds and next year.

I understand that maybe you can’t reveal too much here but if possible, would you be so kind and walk me through how you or how a team generally trains to play past 20 or 25 minutes?

Pad: My best advice without revealing much would be take a look at teams with the lowest average Baron time. See what they do and see if you can replicate it, or find if there are patterns in what they are doing and learn from it.

I can reveal to you – since it’s a public stat – that Rogue’s average Baron time is 25:25 minutes. That is a very, very late Baron take considering they are ahead in 15 out of 18 regular season games. So yes, that would be my best suggestion.

One thing I’d like to talk about is the topic of motivation, which has been discussed throughout summer. As the coaching staff, how do you manage this ramp up to playoffs you always do, because you probably have to tank some losses and social media comments during the regular season?

Pad: We do what you say, we tank as much as we can as the support staff, and we do the opposite of what the general managers from other teams or Twitter analysts say, like we should work harder, we should grind more or put more hours into League and the like.

We do the exact opposite, we do team dinners together, we make sure we have fun and go for ice cream or go for football, or we have one less scrim block a week. We make sure our player’s mental health comes first. We are similar to the old G2 where they were always laughing and having fun. We’re very similar to them in that way and we play better when we have fun, and we don’t have more fun by grinding more or by forcing our players to play 20 solo queue games a day in addition to other things.

We have fun by having fun, and usually by having fun in real life we can translate that into scrims and when we can translate that into scrims, you will see what you saw on stage today.

James “Mac” MacCormack mentioned on PGL that he kept quiet during the regular season and that teams or people memeing your burnout and motivation issues was very irresponsible. I’d like to give the floor to you on this because I think the coaching staff has more to say on it. What are your thoughts on it and do you have anything to add?

Pad: It’s hard, right? It’s like Mac said, everything he said was correct. People kept comparing us to LPL since the LPL teams have this insane work schedule, something like one day off a month during the regular season. I’m not going to go into the psychology behind it because I’m not a psychologist, but the way we see it is that it’s unhealthy.

I think it’s unhealthy to force your players to play x amount of games and be stuck in front of a computer 14 hours a day. The fact that we did our best despite going into a second quarantine to alleviate some of that pressure and release our players from the computer, like getting them to go to team dinners or a park and get some distance away from the game, the fact that was memed was over the line because this was us taking preventive measures for our players to be in the best condition possible. I think it sucked that it was received the way it was.

Adding onto that, do you think the way to prevent this is by encouraging players to speak up about it more and maybe create a discussion around it?

Pad: Getting the players to speak about this season was hard, because they were already under so much pressure. Like Mac said, he kept a lid on it because it would have created a shitshow on social media and there would have been 10 million questions about it. He’ll receive a bunch of questions now and even the players will start receiving questions too. Maybe orgs or people who have spoken out against the way we approached it and the way we talked about burnout being an issue will talk about it.

There was just additional stress that we didn’t want to add to our already stressful season. I think it would be a fine idea to be able to talk about it openly without being memed, because burnout is a real thing and esports is a new phenomenon. We are not like football and we’ve not been established for a 100 years. We still don’t know how it works on a long term basis. We do not have any actual retired player that retired 30 or 40 years ago to tell us how he feels today. We just go by what we think is best for our players, always. If other teams or people disagree with that and don’t think burnout is a serious matter, then it’s up to them.

For our team that went first in spring and could potentially go first going into Worlds 2021, the amount of time that we have compared to teams that don’t make it to playoffs is so, so limited. Even when we get back from Worlds, we’re already preparing for next season already. We might have some weeks off but there’s activities like team building, getting back into the groove and the like. It’s very limited how much time we have away from the game and when that’s the case and when you are a winning team, if you’re not giving yourself time away from LoL, I think you will suffer.

Thank you very much for the comprehensive answer. Coming back to the LEC as we look to round up the interview, now that you made the finals and there are 3 teams left, who do you expect to meet in the finals and why?

Pad: I’m still probably expecting Rogue. They are still the better team, they just didn’t show up today and we also punished them on things they have not punished hard for. Hopefully they will fix those issues so that we will have a more even series in the finals. I think they should beat G2 or Fnatic.

But truthfully, I would’ve loved to face G2 for the narrative and storyline. I think it would have been better, but after this series against Rogue, I just want to play them again. Rogue are fun to play!

Before we end then, are you keeping up with the EU Masters? Any thoughts on your old team Tricked Esport winning the NLC making the EU Masters Main Event?

Pad: Big congratulations to Tricked, it’s amazing. Almost everyone I’ve been in touch with in the ERLs have been succeeding or doing well right now, like Tricked are doing amazing under the new leadership of Jonas Erik “Vandett0” Toth Jensen, who took a team who on paper shouldn’t be in the Main Event in EUM to Main Event.

I hope they’ll do really well and I hope Fnatic Rising does well too to represent NLC, of course. I think the French giants look really scary and Misfits Premier in particular look like a force to be reckoned with. Overall, I’m very happy to see Tricked doing well!

We’ve come to the end of the interview then. Anything else you’d like to add? Any shoutouts you’d like to give?

Pad: I’d like to thank everyone who has been with me since I started this journey. I’m so completely mind-blown that I’m going to Worlds and I won LEC, I went to MSI…so much stuff has happened. To my former players who got me here, Sof, Achuu, Chemera, Mumus, Efias, my analyst Shurpa who is in Fnatic now, Jamada who did LEC casts, there’s just too many people. All of you are great!

Thank you Pad and good luck to MAD Lions in the LEC finals!

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