Swisher: “Hearing the crowd roar was the best feeling ever”

Darragh Harbinson, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 05/09/2025

M80’s Michael ‘Swisher’ Schmid spoke to Esports News UK after their 2-1 defeat at the hands of Mouz at BLAST Open London.

The quarter-final defeat came after a hugely positive event, which saw M80 make a big arena stage for the first time. Swisher reflected on the arena atmosphere, their failings in the match, and looked ahead to the second half of M80’s season.

What are your thoughts on the match?

We definitely showed kind of what we have. We had a great performance on Mirage. We felt like we had it on Ancient.

There were just a couple of rounds at the end that we just like… I made a couple of mistakes in Cave that kind of just made our economy a lot lower on a half-buy, and that just made it so we lost one round on our CT side, and then we were broken.

If we had more money and kind of more discipline on our CT side, I think we would have won that Ancient game and probably had a 2-0. But Inferno, we had no chance, and we kind of have to just look at that.

You picked Ancient, and it was close, but do you think you could have picked Overpass, and would it have been more of a curveball for Mouz?

We definitely thought about it. It was kind of contemplated back and forth a couple of times.

We felt that our T-side is probably in a stronger spot [on Ancient]. For almost all of us, it’s our first stage game, or a big Tier 1 event stage game. So starting T-side Overpass can be a little bit shakier than T-side Ancient.

So that definitely, I feel like, swayed our pick a little bit. But we felt like we were confident in our Ancient. We’ve had a pretty good win streak. I think we had a 10-win streak on it. So we just felt like we still kind of should have won that.

On the arena, can you just describe the emotion of what it’s like to win a map in an arena and how that will motivate you for the rest of the year?

Yeah, we won that map. When HexT wins the clutch there at the end, I look at him, and I’m happy as all can be.

We’re all screaming “YES, NICE!” I pulled off the headset, and just hearing the crowd roar was the best feeling ever. You couldn’t even really hear it with the headset on.

As soon as it comes off, you can just hear everyone roaring for us. It was such a great feeling. One of the best feelings I think I’ve ever had in my life, and it’s something that’s definitely going to be a thing for us again.

When it came to Mirage and Inferno, it felt like the CTs just got in control. They got their economy set, and then it was very hard to kind to get those rounds. So what are you guys going to be working on for the rest of the season?

I think T side on Ancient. I think that we just had a couple rounds that we were trying to understand what they were going to do, what their game plan was. We had maybe two rounds on our T side Ancient, that we thought they were going to play more aggressively when they didn’t.

Then there were rounds that we thought they’d play more passive when they did, when they didn’t as well. So that messed up our start rounds a little bit, and that’s kind of the luck of the draw.

Sometimes you’re going to get the calls right. Sometimes you won’t. There’s nothing you can really do about it.

So there’s not like a tonne we can look at our Ancient.

Our Inferno, we just have to get an idea of what kind of went wrong there.

What about Mirage? There were a lot of rounds in the middle of Mirage when Mouz were making their comeback where it kind of felt the round was almost starting 3v5.

Yeah, that’s something we’ve definitely spoken about before, especially in more important games where we need to keep the pace slower on our first T rounds to give us a chance, because it feels like there are a lot of rounds we don’t even give ourselves a chance to play.

It’s definitely something we’ve been focussing on, and I think, at the end of Mirage, we were like, ‘OK, it’s time to just slow it down, play our smooth defaults, just let them kind of do what they want to do, and we’re going to take map control, and we’re going to win.’

That’s what we did at the end.

Darragh Harbinson, Senior Editor

Darragh Harbinson is an esports writer specialising in Counter-Strike. He has written for Esports News UK, Esports Insider, UKCSGO, Dexerto, and Rush B Media.

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