After Kinguin sent Immunity home after a comeback, we talked to James "James" Quinn to get his point of view on the team's run at ESL One Cologne.

Immunity lost the initial match of the first group phase and were thus forced into the second after a fairly one-sided de_cbble versus Virtus.pro. There, the Australians couldn't close out a match, where they were up 13-6, as Kinguin proceeded to the next stage.

We had a talk with James "⁠James⁠" Quinn to find out what he had to say about the two matches that he and his team played and the team's future.

Starting off with Virtus.pro, you were playing on de_cbble and you had quite a good T side, but then as CT you weren't really able to do much, what did you think about the map at first and then what the match itself?

We were actually happy to play them on Cobblestone, we practiced it back at home a little bit, and we did quite a bit of research on Virtus.pro on Cobblestone. Our Terrorist side, we were very pleased with it. Getting six rounds as Terrorists, we thought "we can win this". Watching the game back last night, there were so many rounds where if just simple little things went our way, if we had been more disciplined, whatever it may be, we could've made it 8-7 to us or even more. We were happy about the map, but as for our CT side, it was very poor. The way it is played over here is completely different to what we're used, they abused how we were playing, they found out what sort of setup we were playing and abused us. And that's credit to them, they found out what we were doing and abused us. That's something we need to work on and hopefully improve.

Rickeh had a beastly performance against Kinguin 

You are quite a young team in terms of international experience and Cobblestone is quite a rotation-based map. Is that a problem with your CT side? Do you think Cobble fits you as a team considering that?

Definitely, the rotations here are so different, the way that a team like Virtus.pro causes you to rotate really exploits your weaknesses and in Australia, you just don't get that. Teams just don't do that to us. Yeah, it's kind of bad by us, in terms of knowing when to rotate, how to rotate, where to rotate to, but if we don't play it, we're never gonna learn. With Australia kind of falling behind as it is already with the maps and the metagame sort of thing, we need to play it here. It's not that it's the only way we can win, we just need to make a stronger map pool, we can't just have one or two maps, they're letting three maps randomized in a best-of-one. Cobble was in there, we let it in there for a reason and just how it panned out.

It took a while before you knew who you were going to play next due to the new system, but when you learned you were going to play Kinguin, what did you do afterwards when you came back to the hotel?

We were actually in the hotel when we learned we were going to play Kinguin. The way that ESL did it was actually very poor. It was about midnight in the hotel room and we were really tired already. Because we were in the last group in the group stage, we thought we'd play at around 3 PM the next day, so we were just about to go to bed when an e-mail popped up with one of the guys saying "The shuttle is going to be at 9:30, you're playing the first game". And we were like "Are you serious? It's midnight, we can't do much research, we have to get up early, not much sleep - we were already jet-lagged as it is, don't take it as an excuse, don't get me wrong. It's quite difficult the way it worked, but we were happy to get Kinguin, we could've got Titan or CLG, and all the teams were going to be hard. We did a little bit of research, not too much, seriously, about half an hour, it was too hard. We sort of knew maps they were going to veto, sort of like what we wanted to play them on. We would've loved to play them on Overpass, because we watched what they did, but they vetoed it. In the randomization group it was Dust2, Inferno and Mirage. The best possible outcome was probably Mirage or Dust2 for us.

While James is disappointed, he takes the experience positively

You were really ahead thanks to Rickeh, he was doing really well with the AWP as CT, but then as Terrorists you were ahead and Kinguin came back, why do you think that happened?

Just experience - Rick did absolutely amazing, that's probably one of the best games I've ever seen him play, so full credit to him and everyone else on the team played really well. I didn't play too good unfortunately, but it just comes down to experience, we didn't know how to close rounds out, we let stupid mistakes happen, we weren't using our chemistry or teamwork, we weren't trading - there was a lot we weren't doing, we were trying new things that worked, but didn't work, tried some more things that worked once but didn't work again. We will get that in the future I assume. 

I noticed you looked pretty bummed out, how did you take this experience? Do you take it as a good sign that you were able to take Virtus.pro pretty well on the first half, and then being able to take Kinguin to the wire?

It definitely is a good sign, but personally I'm quite disappointed about my own performance, and we should've won that game. There is no doubt about it, we were doing good in three quarters of the match, and the last quarter we kind of just went to shit. We gotta look at it positively, you can't look at it negatively - yeah, we made a lot of mistakes, we did this, we did that, but we have to take it as a positive aspect. We don't come here very often, even for this event, the biggest event in CS:GO, we come here with one day of European practice. And that's on us, that's on our organization, that's on whoever set that up. It's hard, it really is, we need to come here, we need the funding behind us, the support, we need to come here with five-days practice. Playing in Europe for one night, we got absolutely demolished in practice, because we got here on Monday night, we couldn't practice, so we had Tuesday and no one was really practising out of top teams. We just played the lower-tier teams of Europe and they didn't respect us. It's kinda hard when you're trying to set things up and practice actualy things, you just got people running at you and just outaiming you. It's not good practice, and that kind of wrecked our confidence as well. For our next event, we definitely need to come here well before, get rid of the jet lag, get some practice in and see what we can actually do. 

Lastly, what is in the future? What is next for you, do you know about anything?

We actually don't know anything, with this going how Renegades are maybe going to ESL ESEA Pro League, which is absolutely amazing for the Australian scene, it kind of puts a damper on it. If we were looking to move over, which we don't know, but it might be something in the future, the Australian scene looks a lot weaker now. Those teams may not have the motivation, teams are always changing, they're trying to beat us and we're trying to focus on the international scene. International events - we obviously wanna come to more, so whenever we can, really, we're definitely going to look forward to it, but we don't know, nothing is on the horizon at the moment.

We have one more group left to be played, which will determine the last team advancing to quarter-finals, who will meet fnatic in tomorrow's last best-of-three.

James 'James' Quinn Age: 21 Team: Immunity Rating 1.0: 0.83 Maps played: 30 KPR: 0.59 DPR: 0.72