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VCT Masters Madrid is the first international Valorant event of the 2024 season. Here, eight teams from all over the world are doing their best to try and secure the title of Masters winners. Day 2 was filled with exciting matches, and one of them was between Americas' Sentinels and EMEA's Team Heretics.
These two teams are among the strongest at the event and lived up to the expectations by dragging each other to the decider map. After a lot of back and forth, Sentinels just barely managed to avoid overtime and won the Bo3 (Best-of-three) series by 2-1.
During the post-match conference, Sportskeeda Esports got the chance to talk to Sentinels' Zellsis, during which he said:
"We have just been blessed early as a team"
Sentinels' Zellsis talks about being the emotional leader of the squad and their win against Team Heretics in VCT Masters Madrid
Sentinels are one of the strongest teams this year. Their roster changes produced a squad filled with incredibly talented and experienced players. They are definitely one of the tournament favorites in VCT Masters Madrid.
The matchup was predicted to be a close one as both teams were able to comfortably win on their own map picks. On all three maps of this Bo3 series, Sentinels started very slowly, mostly ending up in disadvantageous situations. Despite this, they managed to come back extraordinarily and made their way further into VCT Masters Madrid.
During the post-match conference, Sportskeeda Esports approached Sentinels' Zellsis to ask him about how he was able to reset the team's mentality during the stressful moments that eventually led to the victory. Here's what he said:
"It's just always reminding us that we can win the game. I mean our team has been blessed like early on with our roster of like coming back from really big deficits. So honestly I think, at least for me personally I think even when we are down like we are not losing it feels like, we are losing obviously but you know never feels like we are losing. I think that's a really good thing for a team to have cause we can always come back and we always have strong mental."
He further added:
"The biggest thing is to just like check in on everyone, making sure everyone's still high energy. And the guys are like doing really well. It's not just on me. Zach (zekken) does really good job of checking everyone as well. Amine (johnqt) does a good job and Kap (Kaplan) takes his timeout and yells at us when we are being dumb. So yeah we have just been blessed early as a team when we made the roster."
With this win, Sentinels will head deeper into the winner's bracket of the Swiss stage in VCT Masters Madrid. Their next opponent will be EMEA's number one seed, Karmine Corp.
Check out these VCT articles:
All the qualified teams at Masters Madrid || 5 Duelist players to look out for at Masters Madrid || 5 Controller players to look out for at Masters Madrid
