UKTerrorist

Four-Kings Intel Preview - Harriman Interview

Posted by Myers at 01:05 27/2/2005.

At 5am GMT today Four-Kings Intel will play GamerCo for a spot in the finals of the World eSports Games. Winning 5 of their previous 6 games, including victories over MouseSports and NoA, 4K have been the surprise team of the tournament.

GamerCo on the other hand have underperformed throughout the event, winning just two games from the group stages and advancing on round difference in a 3-way split. Despite being down to wNv they advanced when their Chinese opposition were disqualified for either looking at the 0-delay HLTV or one of the GamerCo screens, the fact that the admins do not actually know which is suspicious enough. Midway has written up a pretty decent pre-match analysis.

After a disappointing 13th-16th finish at Winter CPL, 4Kings has continued to improve in each game as their teamwork with this lineup continues to get better.

4King’s superstar Marc Mangiacapra has been aided by strong play from Jonas “GoodFella” Virtanen. Virtanen led all scoring at CPL Winter and has continued to play well at WEG.

I managed to have a few words with 4K^Harriman a few hours before the game was due to take place:

Reflecting upon your gaming career, this is the first time 4K have reached the semi-finals of a major competition, how have the team been preparing both mentally and tactically to compete against GamerCo, and how important is this game to you?

Harriman - Well with it being such a late round in the competition, and many teams being already eliminated, its been hard for us to practice at all. Teams such as wNv and even mouz are no longer practicing, and spend their days streaming movies making it almost impossible for us to play over the Internet as well. We should however be fully prepared by now, as we're a good 4 weeks into the competition...but as always our lax attitude towards practicing anything before the day of the semi final, will maybe let us down.. I guess we'll see. We usually manage to pull things together on the day!

What do you make of GamerCo's poor performance so far at this event and which player(s) from their lineup do you most fear? What's your prediction for the final score?

Harriman - GamerCo do appear to have played poorly to this point, but in their defense I think its been a difficuly event. Personally I've found it hard to play well because of a combination of the "bad food" in many peoples opinions, and the cirumstances as to which all the teams are living in small cramped rooms, so its hard to feel even 80% at any time. I'm not sure who I think is their best player, but while we were going over tactics last night, Marc was making sure we knew.. not to go A because johnny plays there, and dont go B either because he backs yup to B, so im guessing johnny is their best player!

If you win you'll be up against NoA, do you think 4K can defeat them again?

Harriman -Yeah we're easily capable of beating NoA as we've already shown, however beating them on a best of 5 maps will prove a lot more difficult, and probably require a fair bit of luck, but anything is possible in cs these days.

What has it been like living in a different country for so long, and how does Korea compare to the other countries you've attended gaming tournaments in? Brazil, Sweden, Spain, USA, France? What have you most missed about the UK?

Harriman - Seoul is an amazing city, i've been here for both WCG2002 and 2003 as you know Rich! But we're actually staying a long way outside of the city this time, up in some mountain top village... well i say village, i mean 3 houses built for and used by the WEG only. So I dont think this is a fair reflection of what living in Korea would be like. The main difference between Korea and other countries is the lack of English speaking people around, not that its a bad thing though. All of the countries ive visited are very different and hard to explain the differences in just a few words... but I dont hope to be staying in any of them for more than a week anytime soon! Theres a lot of things I miss about England, brown sauce, football on television, proper meals, comfortable beds.. as well as one or two other important things missing from this trip.

What's next after this event for 4K?

Harriman - I think we've been invited to season 2 of WEG, but it starts about 2 weeks after season 1 finishes. I cant speak for everyone here but I dont want to spend that much time away from little Stratford, and from what I gather everyone hosts similar feelings about it, maybe you'll see me at season 7. I'm not sure what events are coming up, there a few we've been invited too, and some CPL stops in spain and somewhere else I'm not sure of, as well as ECG for myself, and some acon5 LAN also has been mentioned.. im really not sure but there appears to be no shortage just yet.  Right I have to go, bus leaves in 15 minutes and everyone is moaning at me cos i'm still in bed with keyboard my chest.

UKT would like to thank Stu for taking the time of his clearly busy schedule to answer these questions, and we wish him the best of luck tonight.