In the NAVI camp, it is hard to get a good understanding of how the 2026 season of Counter-Strike should be viewed. The team is one of the few with two A-tier tournament wins under their belt after victories at IEM Atlanta and at the ESL Pro League Season 23. On the other hand, the team crashed out of the big three events of the year so far in Krakow, Cologne, and at the EWC in Paris last week.
We spoke with NAVI’s in-game leader Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen at the media day before the BLAST Porto Open 2026 tournament, where NAVI is scheduled to play M80 later today.
Analyzing the structural collapse against Legacy
Five days after failing to reach the quarter-finals at the Esports World Cup, the team has reviewed match footage to identify their strategic failures. Aleksib credited the Brazilian roster for a superior mechanical performance but maintained that Natus Vincere failed to execute their standard game plan.
In the end, to be fair, they did play a lot better. They were just on top of everything and they were shooting way harder,” Aleksib said. “But we did end up finding the gaps that we were doing and understanding what went wrong there.
The squad has spent the intervening days attempting to correct minor mistakes while resetting their mindset for crucial rounds.
We definitely analyzed the game and tried everything we could to fix all the tiny mistakes that we did on that game,” he added. “Overall, we also tried to do our best on the mental aspect as well to be ready on the crucial moments because that’s something we didn’t do.
The requirement for team-wide confidence
To regain their championship form, the captain stressed the strict necessity of trust within the server. While individual players can derive confidence from personal statistics, the in-game leader stated the entire unit must trust their ability to defeat top-tier opponents.
Most of all right now, I do think we just need confidence,” Aleksib explained. “Confidence is something that individuals might gain based off of their own performances, but as a team, we need the confidence to understand that we can beat better teams, not only teams that we should beat.
The campaign for the BLAST Open Porto playoffs begins with an opening round match against M80 at 16.00 CEST. You can see the full interview with the Finnish IGL down below.
