ZywOo: It feels pretty crazy to be able to say, “We haven’t won a championship in a long time.

ZywOo was named the tournament MVP after posting a 1.50 Rating at StarLadder StarSeries Fall in Barcelona. On championship day, Vitality first beat FURIA in the lower-bracket final before defeating Aurora in the grand final to lift the trophy.

This is the 33rd MVP medal of ZywOo's career, as well as his first MVP of the season. After the match, HLTV spoke with the French star about his and Vitality's run to the title at this event, and the team's goals moving forward.

Q: You were just named MVP of StarLadder StarSeries Fall—your 33rd MVP, which is already an incredible number. At the same time, this is your first MVP of the season; the last one came in Fort Worth. How does it feel to win another MVP?

ZywOo: It feels great, and there’s also a bit of relief.

I hope I can win at least one MVP in the second half of the season. That would give me more confidence, and I also want to win another title. I think those two things go hand in hand.

So it feels really good to be able to win this MVP now. Like you said, this is the 33rd one.

But I don’t think this was just down to me. The whole team played really well this time, so I have to thank them too. It feels really good.

Q: You mentioned confidence. In Barcelona this time, you really did look extremely confident. After the match, apEX even joked, "Just let ZywOo go out and one-tap everyone." What did it feel like to play so freely on the server at this event?

ZywOo: After the last stop in Porto ended, we sat down with almost everyone one-on-one to get a sense of how each person was feeling.

I think it helped lift some of the weight we’d been carrying for a while. Everyone feels better now and has more confidence, because we understand each other better, we know how each person sees the game, and we also know how everyone is feeling.

After those conversations, things became much clearer for me—both what we actually want to do in matches and what we need to do outside of them.

I think it let a lot of things out and took a lot of pressure off us, which made us more confident.

That also helped us become more... not necessarily more "mature," but more professional. We have a clearer understanding of what we need to do once we're really in the match to get back to our highest level.

I think this tournament still showed a lot of good things from us overall, even though we lost to Aurora yesterday. So it means a lot to us.

Q: You lost to Aurora yesterday, then faced them again today in a very long series that could theoretically have gone to eight maps. In the end, you played six. Anubis in particular stood out: you lost it yesterday, but played it very well today. What changed compared with yesterday?

ZywOo: I think the biggest change today was that our T side was clearly much better.

Yesterday, we only seemed to win three rounds on the T side. Today, though, we were clearly much better, both as a team and individually.

I played better today myself, and I think everyone played better too.

We just fixed the mistakes we made yesterday. After the match yesterday, we looked at those issues and adjusted everything across the board.

Yesterday, we played too passively. We kept waiting for them to make the first move, but they didn’t do anything, so we were just sitting there thinking, "What do we do now?" Then we kind of didn’t know what to do.

But today we played with a lot more confidence and took the initiative to play the kind of game we wanted.

So overall, Anubis went pretty smoothly for us today. Even though it isn’t our best map and we’ve still been working on it a lot, we know that as long as we play together and everyone is clear on what they need to do, we can be very strong on this map.

As for the six maps, I think everyone was honestly prepared to go all the way to eight.

We knew today could be a very long one, maybe eight or nine hours straight, but everyone was ready to keep fighting at any moment.

I think that’s also why our mindset is like this. Even if we win one map very comfortably, it doesn’t really matter—we know there could still be a lot more maps ahead, so we can’t think about saving energy.

Every round, every map, we have to fight all the way.

Q: Talk a bit about winning a title again. mezii was absent for a while before this, and the team also wasn’t at its peak. Now that you’ve finally lifted the trophy again, how does it feel?

ZywOo: I think that also helped us let a lot of things out.

It’s not necessarily pressure, but at least we’ve finally won another title.

Before this, some people might have said that it wasn’t that we were completely washed, but they probably felt like we were done—that we weren’t going to win titles anymore—because the way we were playing had changed compared to before.

But I think this event proved that we’re still one of the best teams in the world.

We can still show a very high level in matches. Of course, sometimes our form drops too, and that’s normal—we’re human.

But we need to understand each other better and rely on each other more. When someone is struggling, they need to communicate with their teammates and with the team as a whole.

That helped us a lot.

And mezii has found his form again now as well. I think that’s really good for him too, because he played extremely well in the grand final.

So everyone was happy for him, and for the way the whole team performed.

Overall, we're obviously very happy. We lifted another trophy.

I think it’s been about three months since we last won a title. The fact that we can even say, "It’s been a long time since we won a championship," feels pretty crazy, honestly (laughs).

But we're really happy.

Q: Finally, let’s talk about the upcoming EPL. With a few weeks still to go before the event, will you take a short break first, or jump straight back into practice? What’s the plan from here?

ZywOo: I think we’ll keep practicing.

Because Bucharest comes after EPL, and we’ll be playing with jL again by then.

So even though we won this time, it doesn’t change much for us—we still want to keep improving and get better every day.

No matter what, our main goal is still the Major.

If we can come out of these events feeling more confident and better prepared, then that’s a good thing.

Whether it’s EPL, Bucharest, or any other tournament, we come here to win, and at the same time to keep improving every day.

That’s our main goal.

Next, we’ll go back over the mistakes we made at this event and fix them. After that, we’ll keep doing the same.