After the successful performance of Natus Vincere in the group stage of the fall season BLAST Premier, the team's coach Andrei «B1ad3» Gorodensky gave an interview to the portal HLTV, sharing his opinion about the current level of headr1ck. He also talked about the possible imminent return of s1mple to the main squad.
In the matches that took place the day before, NAVI had to play with Daniil «headr1ck» Valitov as a substitute for s1mple, as the latter was unable to participate in the starting matches of the tournament «for personal reasons. Despite the fact that headtr1ck, who is now eighteen years old, showed quite a good performance (on the four cards played at the tournament his average rating was 1.12), Gorodensky believes that the player is not yet ready to compete at this level. The coach mentioned that sometimes headtr1ck acts passively because of confusion or fear of failure, and he needs to gain more experience to overcome this.
He also mentioned that he expects s1mple to appear in the main squad as early as Monday. According to the coach, contrary to what was written on many news portals, from the very beginning it was planned that Kostylev would miss not the entire group stage, but only one competition day.