NiKo: "I did not deserve to win a Major in CS:GO"

The Bosnian superstar will go down in history as one of the best players to never win a CS:GO Major.

Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač landed in Paris as one of the best and most-storied players in CS:GO to never have won a Major title, and that is something that will never change. The Bosnian superstar has been eliminated from the BLAST.tv Paris Major in the Legends stage following a loss to fnatic in the 1-2 pool, cementing his name in the history books as the superstar who never took things over the line.

HLTV spoke to NiKo after the heartbreaking loss, with the 26-year-old sharing his feelings on G2's early elimination and how he feels about never winning a CS:GO Major.

Read more The best players to have never won a CS:GO Major before Paris

NiKo, eliminated from the last CS:GO Major. Tell me what's going through your mind, what are some of the thoughts you have right now?

Not really much. I still cannot really believe it, we underperformed so hard today and on the first day. It just felt like everything went so fast, and I don't even know what went wrong or what was the reason. Still can't believe that we didn't make it to the playoffs honestly,

I really felt like we were much better than what we showed today and on the first day. Just an embarrassing performanceby us and props to fnatic for playing really good in a high pressure game.

Yeah, my commiserations for the loss. Something HooXi was saying yesterday was the team felt a lot of pressure, did you feel that too coming into this with a lot of emphasis on it being your last chance to take a Major?

I mean there was pressure obviously, I don't think it was the biggest reason why we lost. It's kind of hard to tell because yesterday we had a clean game versus FURIA and it was kind of one-sided, so they didn't really test us under high pressure. While today was a bit different, and I think it's not very normal to have this kind of pressure. I just felt like we failed to adapt to their game and... yeah.

You took the first map in the series, then they reverse-swept. You almost had a comeback going on the last map, can you tell me anything from your side as to what was happening towards the end, especially as your performance dipped off?

Yeah, we make a comeback on T side, and then we let them come back toward the end where in both rounds we had an entry, even two entries, and we just played it very bad. I mean our T side, we feel very confident in it, the whole event it was really good — even in Challengers stage.

After a kinda bad CT side we did not give up, we believed, and it was a kinda clean game by us — everything until the end. Then we just discussed what went wrong on CT side in overtime, and we found a solution and closed out the game on Inferno.

Heartbreaking loss. What's the plan from here, what are you doing going forward out of this?

We have another event in ten days, two weeks, I don't know. It's definitely a big hit for the team, especially knowing that there are no more Majors in CS:GO, and now... yeah, I'm not really sure how to deal with it right now, or what the plan is. Honestly hard to tell, we have two more events until the end of the season and then we'll see what will happen with the team.

When it comes to me, obviously failed to win a Major in CS:GO, did not deserve to win one, and yeah as I said earlier in the [broadcast] interview, next chapter starts in CS2 and the grind has to continue. Hopefully I will lift one in CS2.

fnatic #15 Freddy 'KRIMZ' JohanssonDion 'FASHR' DerksenNico 'nicoodoz' TamjidiFredrik 'roeJ' JørgensenWilliam 'mezii' Merriman Jamie 'keita' Hall Nikola 'NiKo' Kovač Age: 26 Team: G2 Rating 1.0: 1.15 Maps played: 1728 KPR: 0.79 DPR: 0.67 G2 #6 Nikola 'NiKo' KovačNemanja 'huNter-' KovačJustin 'jks' SavageRasmus 'HooXi' NielsenIlya 'm0NESY' Osipov Jan 'Swani' Müller