NAVI team leader Alexander «s1mple» Kostylev gave an interview to HLTV, in which he talked about how the team prepares for the tournaments and shared his opinion about the recent Akuma performance scandal.
Speaking about training before the BLAST Premier Spring Final, s1mple noted that all Natus Vincere members have been actively preparing to play Ancient and are looking forward to testing this map for the first time in an official match. Discussing the reasons for the team's recent unstable results, the cyber athlete made several assumptions.
He believes that it is more difficult for them to play against teams from the CIS, because they are more familiar with the style of play of Natus Vincere than representatives of other regions, and can purposefully train with this in mind. Also, NAVI has not had much time to prepare recently due to the fact that the competitions have been happening almost consecutively, one after another. In addition, when training takes place mostly online, it is harder for players to concentrate on the tasks at hand.
Commenting on the accusations against Akuma, s1mple said that he would not like to believe these allegations. He believes that cheating at this level of competition – shows extreme disrespect to the other teams, and so it would be sad if it turned out to be true. S1mple doesn't rule out that some of the participants could have gotten additional information by using GOTV's broadcast without delay, but admits that other Akuma players could have simply been unaware of the infiltrators' actions.