After just five months of having signed the ex-Cloud9 major winning trio Timothy “autimatic” Ta, William “RUSH” Wierzba, and Jake “Stewie2K” Yip to their active CS:GO division, Evil Geniuses found themselves unable to keep the ball rolling after failing to qualify for the PGL Antwerp 2022 Major following their exit from the ESL Pro League Season 15 with a winless record, 0-5. This led to head coach Damien “maLeK” Marcel benching himself to an inactive role while the team parted ways with EVY, assistant to maLeK.
In an exclusive video interview with 1pv.fr and later published in a written format, EVY shed light on the hardships the coaching staff faced while working with Stewie2K and company.
“The basic idea going forward was to part with Stewie, 1000%. In the end, it was maLeK or Stewie. We could have kept Stewie as a player, although he could have challenged the authority and made his star, but it could have worked. When the players have figured out the Stewie problem, if you don’t make changes, who do you put in the lead?” were the closing words of EVY who explained the whole situation to French journalist Guillaume “neLendirekt” Rathier.
There is definitely more to this which lays the foundation of what exactly went wrong within EG, citing the crushing attitude of Stewie2K’s which was called out by EVY in the interview.
“Stewie wouldn’t say hello to Damien when we walked into the room, starting on day 5/6. When Damien spoke, he was turned back to his pc, he wasn’t listening to him. Sometimes Stewie would listen to Damien and then turn around and not respond. One of the worst things I’ve seen is denying tactical breaks. Damien called tactical breaks and Stewie said no. I’ve never seen that, and from the first official game. We looked at each other and we didn’t understand.”
With the above claim, the whole EG roster had reported this attitude of their IGL a few months later after crashing out of the Regional Major Ranking tournament of the PGL Antwerp Major 2022 to which the staff team weren’t at all surprised, having radioed mayday at the very start of their challenge. It has also been brought to the community that Stewie2K sometimes would ignore new ideas discussed within the team to only come up with the same idea after a day or two, labeling it as his own.
“At the end of the RMR, the players came to us, it’s been 3 months, and 3 months at EG is a very very long time… the players tell us ‘Paolo, Stewie’s attitude, it’s not okay.‘… bro we’ve been telling you that since day 2!
Despite the fact that Stewie2K stopped calling at the Pro League in the absence of maLeK and with EVY behind the players and with their CEO Nicole LaPointe Jameson having noticed the same, no further steps were taken regarding the dismissive behavior of the former including his playstyle which was sometimes funny and would rage too as mentioned above.
autimatic too had backed Stewie2K during EVY and maLeK’s tenure which indeed had left the European duo shocked.
We meet the first night at the restaurant and I hear stuff… “My vision of a coach is a guy who doesn’t decide and assists”. The American mentality is that the coach is a yes man, he gets paid $XXk to say ‘yes! Nice guys‘. From the first night, I said to myself ‘watch out, red flag‘. That was autimatic’s vision, a vision that has evolved by the way, and I think he really regrets our departures with maLeK. In the beginning, he was in stewie’s camp, like “let us do our shit, we won a major we know how to do“.
Initially, maLeK had resisted the signing of Stewie2K to the roster but it was once again the EG Management who were adamant on the transfer of the 24-year-old from Team Liquid. Ever since they completed their roster with the signings of RUSH and autimatic, only Vincent “Brehze” Cayonte and Tsvetelin “CeRq” Dimitrov had been supportive of the project while RUSH was trying to bridge the gap between the players and the coach.
Stay tuned for what Stewie2K has to say as he suggested that every story has two sides and would reveal his part of the story live on Twitch.
