C9 Zven: “Every game, after ten minutes, was already kind of lost”

A disheartening 3-0 loss to LCK first seed Gen.G has seen the LCS’ Cloud9 crash out of MSI 2023. AD carry-turned-support Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen spoke to the media to give his honest thoughts on the series.

He admitted that he felt “pretty s**t” about the result where his side “didn’t even have a chance to win any of the games.” Zven found that, despite “doing really well in lane” in multiple games, “the laning phase wasn’t that important, it was more about the dragon and the herald situations.”

“I think we were doing well in lane in the first game, and the second game too. But in the second game we had a few situations where we got a good trade bot, but I used flash for it, so we felt like we were getting ganked. So Blaber covered us, but when Blaber left to his top-side jungle we found out that Wukong wasn’t even bot in the first place – he was actually in our jungle. So then Blaber was really far behind and the game got really hard, so we couldn’t really play our matchup because Wukong was there and they flashed on me and then got me.”

When quizzed on what Cloud9 could have done better, Zven reiterated the level of the team’s early game and once again looked at the broader aspects of the match, explaining that they “have to understand our team comps better.”:

“Honestly I think there’s too many things for us to work on to beat Gen.G right now. I think every game the laning phase was fine for everyone, but always at nine, ten minutes into the game something goes wrong. Like the third game, the dragon fight lost the whole game. The first game we had a herald situation top side where we had multiple people dying and then the whole game just falls apart because we can no longer tank the hook from Blitzcrank or Nautilus.”

“We couldn’t even get past ten minutes in this game without being very far behind, so I think there’s nothing to talk about. We just need to play better early game before we can talk about the actual game.”

Many Western fans have expressed disappointment at the lack of an LCS vs LEC matchup at MSI 2023. Esports.net asked Zven about his desire to play EU sides and how he thinks Cloud9 would have fared.

“Given how not-competitive these games are between EU/NA and the Eastern teams, it would have been nice to see at least who’s better between EU and NA. G2 actually won two games in the bracket stage, not that winning a game actually matters, but they actually put up a good fight against BLG and they could’ve won against BLG I think. If BLG didn’t throw, it would have been 3-0, but still G2 put up a good fight. I would have loved to play against them or MAD Lions just to settle that score at least. But it is what it is.”

MSI 2023 continues with an all-Eastern bracket today, as T1 meets JDG in a bid for the final.