Shifters' first loss of the weekend at the LEC Roadshow in Évry trims the team's playoff odds to 0.6%. Head coach Striker spoke to RFT.GG about the reasons behind a stalling season: a solid early game undone, match after match, by a crumbling mid-late. The coach also looked ahead — to next week's EWC qualifiers, the review that awaits before Summer Split, and his own future on the bench.
How are you feeling?
Not good, as you can imagine. It's doubly hard because we're almost out of playoffs after this loss. And it was on a stage a bit bigger than the LEC's, so those are always games that matter more, beyond the pure result on the standings.
It has become a pattern — you win the early game and throw from there. How do you explain never really finding yourselves in games?
There are probably two reasons. The first is that we have a playstyle pushed toward winning the early game, getting winning lanes, and that goes all the way down to the draft — we prepare for it. So on average, it's normal that our early game is better than our mid-late game.
We can truly see that there is a real incoherence problem with the project since Shifters (BDS at that time) decided to part ways with Adam and Sheo. Their playstyle went from really agressive and concluding to a passive playstyle with poor recruitments (Deciding to kick Adam for Irrelevant, then benching Irrelevant to import a random korean that didnt even prove anything back in LCK CL). We can see that Striker is trying is hardest to to things right but honestly, those past 2 years choices are by far the worst that i saw. Having i diamond topside that needed to be shaped to a dogshit team with mental boom. I hope for nuc. to bounce back.