After a top 8 finish at I34 Zen have confirmed they'll be sticking with the LAN roster they were forced to make do with.

On Thursday most of Zen woke up thinking they were going to attend i34 with 4 of their players plus merc Martin "Techno" Dearlove. However, it transpired that regular 4th Aaron "Aaron" Khatkar was unable to attend due to a family emergency. At the last minute Louis "Macky" McErlane stepped up to the plate and filled in for the team. The event went exceptionally for the "mix team" and they achieved a commendable 7th/8th finish, well above their seed. Last night it was announced that rather than seeing a return to the line-up from Aaron the two mercs Macky and Techno will be staying with the team.

I caught up with team-leader Matthew "deathdisco" Healy-Smith to get his point of view.

Hi Matthew! First of all congratulations on your LAN performance. At LANs in the past it has been claimed that some of the members of your team have been unable to perform on LAN due to pressure. Do you feel that turning up with no expectations helped your teams performance?

Thanks Al, the main pressure turning up to this lan was having a 5th! The last month for us has been very up and down since CLUK, since we have had some roster issues. Also, we wanted to prove ourselves to be the players on lan as we were online, especially after our lucklustre performance at CLUK, where we really didn't meet our our expectations. Macky was drafted in on the day of early arrival at this lan to replace Aaron who coudln't attend due to family problems. Macky literally paid and got on the roster just in time before tournament registrations. This definately lowered our expectations and in turn we felt less pressure in game to perform and just played our own game, which helped a lot.

So after the LAN you decided to stick with Techno and Macky and have removed Aaron. Can you talk us through this decision?

At LAN, everything clicked. We had been having roster issues for the last month with techno only coming in to merc for us a week before lan. After a performance beyond our expectations, and probably the expectations of others we all felt it would be a stupid move not to build on what we have achieved at i34 and take it to the next level for future events. Obviously, there are some casualities in the process of this decision, namely Aaron, but we feel this is the right decision for the team to progress.

You say that everything just clicked, this was certainly evident from your impressive 16-6 and 16-5 results vs infused and fragmasters toxic respectively Did you expect to win so convincingly?

Going into those games we were confident we could win as we had the players with aim to get us by, though we knew we would have to play at our best individually to pull the results off. Also, we had only had a handful of PCWs before lan, and obviously with last minute roster change we had little to no strats to use.

I think we all suprised ourselves by the margins that we won the games as we expected them to be very close games. A lot of the rounds, especially in the infused game came down to some awesome individual performances from Carrel and Macky which turned rounds on their heads. It boosted the teams overall morale which i think helped us keep up the momentum during the games.

Whats the plan from here for zen CSS?

The plan from now is, we will actually be taking a short break while i have some outstanding uni work to finish then after that we will be practicing for PCGAMER lan at the end of september. With the number of EU teams attending that lan aswell at the CGS teams, i think we really need to show that this lan performance wasn't a one-off and that we can build some consistency. We also plan on attending all the uk lans such as CLUK, sychosis and the next iseries.

Online, we have applied for the upcoming Eurokrieg, though there is only a few spots left in the UK division so they will be hotly contended for. Apart from that we will be looking on entering what online competitions we can fit into our schedule, though, our main priority will be practicing for PCGAMER.

Any shoutouts?

Theres so many people i'd like to shoutout to but the list would be too long, so to anyone who thinks i've missed them then you should probably be on here too :)

Aaron for being understanding over our decision Macky for coming in last minute for this lan and staying on M4dams for getting Macky's PC working on the day of lan All those on cC vent, you know who you are :) noREPLY for doing great this iseries

Thanks for your time

This leaves the Zen lineup as;

Matthew "deathdisco" Healy-Smith
Chris "Debaser" Flynn
Matthew "Carrel" Carrel
Martin "Techno" Dearlove
Louis "Macky" McErlane