Joona 'natu' Leppänen of Power Gaming is already a WCG medalist having picked up a bronze at the first event in 2001. Joined by two other Finnish Bronze medalists (ruuit and naSu from 2006) he is looking to take Finland to its first gold or silver at gaming's equivalent to the olympics. He discussed his team's play in the group stage and what they expect from their playoff matchups.

In your first group game you faced Virtus.Pro on tuscan who you managed to narrowly beat 16:14. At one point you were up 13:9 in the second half but Virtus managed to put themselves in a position to force overtime if they won the last round, that is until ruuit had one of those ruuit rounds and killed four of them. What thoughts do you have of that game?

We made the game very hard on ourselves by giving them both pistol rounds. Beginning of the game wasn't very good for us at all, we were down 4-0 until we started to rack up rounds on the board. T-side we ended up doing mostly things we hadn't done before due to how we though they would play. Seemed to pay off with the 9 rounds that we got. CT-side we played a little different from most teams I would say - having 3 people play aggressive on the smaller site most of the time. Honestly it could've gone either way but luckily ruuit got those kills through the smoke. Best possible start for the groups.

In your third game you faced mTw.dk on dust2 who were the favourites to win the group. Despite this you began in great fashion only to wind up losing 12:18. What happened to let that game get away from you?

Yeah we started out great going up like 7-1, then we just seemed to run out of steam for some reason - got denied on catwalk a bunch of times, mostly by a bit of sloppy play. Second half we won pistol again by running over them but then got deagle'd on the 2nd round which seemed to have been the final turning point in their favour. We couldn't recover and the rounds just slipped away. We were very disappointed and know we could've racked up so much rounds on both sides but oh well - thankfully there's tomorrow's playoffs to redeem ourselves.

The last game of the tournament saw you surprisingly tie 15:15 with Australia's SequentialGaming on train. What can you tell us about that game to close out the group?

Last game almost cost us, we believed that Virtus had obviously won against the Greek team - which they hadn't. So we caluclated that 7 rounds in the last game would put us through. We weren't even being so intensively in that game, we were down like 11-15 but pulled through a tie with having to buy famases and stuff in that situation. After the game we thought it was so weird the opponents were 100% devastated from the score - only did we realise back at the hotel that we HAD to at least get a tie to advance. That would've really been the epic fail of the year had we "accidentally" gone out...

In the first round of the playoffs you are matched against the Ukraine's HellRaisers so what are your thoughts on that matchup?

They're a very skilled team so we really need to step it up to pull through. It will all come down to which team hits their shots pretty much. But I'm confident, we've all got loads of experience from these games so I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's games. Chances are 50-50 pretty much but I'm expecting us to advance, would be a huge disappointment if we didn't.

What can you say about your side of the bracket?

I mean it's always good to have teams like fnatic and mTw on the other end of the bracket but the Poles, wNv, h2k and Cmax shouldn't be underestimated at all. Should we win the first game I'm expecting us to meet up with AGAiN. If we pull through those then anything can happen.

(Photograph copyright of fragbite)