Team Vitality’s star since their inception Mathieu ‘ZywOo’ Herbaut shed light on the turbulent year his team had and was critical of his own performance as well. Talking to Esports Kingdom, the 21-year-old prodigy wasn’t shy of accepting that Aleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev was the better player, and anyone who watched the 2021 season would accept that.
Team Vitality had a good 2020, experimenting with a 6 man roster helped them the most and they won multiple trophies last year and were one of the more consistent teams in the Online era. Coming to 2021, they were a shadow of their former selves and won their first trophy in December with IEM Winter.
ZywOo was the MVP of the tournament, his first of the year while his counterpart has won 7 already and maybe on course for an 8th with BLAST World Finals coming up. ZywOo had a slightly disappointing start to 2021 and it was in the early days that he had his worst ever map in CSGO on Overpass. He bounced back in the second half and helped his team achieve multiple top 4 finishes and also a top 8 spot at the PGL Major.
‘Of course s1mple is better than me this year, but I had a bad year too. I’m going to do everything next year in 2022 to get better. I know this year was pretty hard with COVID, we have to play from home, it was really hard sometimes. For sure, s1mple was better than me this year, I have no problem saying it, but I want to play better in 2022 and that’s it.”
ZywOo Said
Finally winning an MVP and an S-tier trophy, Vitality are slowly coming back but with roster changes almost confirmed, it will be interesting to see how the team performs after signing ‘dupreeh’, ‘Magisk’ and ‘zonic’ as coach. ‘shox’ might leave for Liquid while ‘Kyojin’ is also going to be benched from the looks of things.
After winning the MVP in a post-match interview, ZywOo also claimed that it was due to COVID and playing from home that they couldn’t perform as well as they would have liked. With LANs slowly coming back, Vitality could hit their peak sooner rather than later and we could see an even closer rivalry between him and s1mple just like 2020 was neck and neck until the end of the year.
