It’s been less than a week since the Russian CS:GO captain Vladislav “nafany” Gorshkov was removed from Cloud9’s starting lineup. A lot of players would feel upset about getting cut from one the best teams in the world, but not nafany.
The 22-year-old said during a livestream after his removal to make room for former NAVI stars electroNic and Perfecto on July 14 that he felt “hardly upset at all” because what happened on C9 led to the kick. The team failed to live up to the expectations created by the community after they left Gambit to join C9 in April 2022 and had lackluster performances in nearly every tournament this year, except a second-place finish at ESL Pro League season 17 in March.
Nafany was once considered one of the most promising CS:GO in-game leaders but saw his stock plummet after C9’s woes this year. What many fans didn’t know, however, is how he actually struggled to fulfill his in-game leadership obligations due to the nature of his relationship with star players sh1ro and Ax1Le, the third and fourth-best players in the world in 2022, according to HLTV.
The trio had been playing together since June 2019 under the Gambit Youngsters banner and rose to prominence together. Their friendship, though, didn’t allow nafany to have a stronger voice on C9 and make some important decisions.
“I was not really a leader, our relationship did not allow that,” nafany said in a recent livestream, according to a news article published by EscoreNews on July 17. “We got too used to each other. We started our careers on the same level, and were continuing on the same level. My opinion did not matter more than sh1ro’s, for example. More often it was even the opposite. If sh1ro was saying that he doesn’t want to play on some position, I couldn’t say ‘No, you have to play here’.”
Nafany stressed, however, that it wasn’t sh1ro and Ax1Le’s fault and took the blame for not honoring his leadership roles. There’s no bad blood between any of them either, and he even said he’ll cheer for C9’s new team.
The Russian IGL is on the C9 bench until he signs with another organization, which is not looking like it will happen any time soon as many top teams have already made changes during the offseason.
CS:GO pundit Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg, a longstanding critic of nafany, said on July 17 the 22-year-old is more fit to be an aggressive rifler than to keep playing as an IGL. But based on his recent livestream, nafany seems determined to join another team as a shot-caller again.
