lurppis: "This was the ESL's fault"

Evil Geniuses captain Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen has shaken off criticism for not agreeing on a round restart during the match against fnatic.

The Finnish star won a 1-on-3 situation during the second half after three of fnatic's players were experiencing freezes following network problems caused by a DDoS attack on the ESL's servers.

The match was then paused, with fnatic calling for a round restart, which was immediately declined by Evil Geniuses, who went on to win the match 18-12.

Kovanen has now put the blame on the tournament admins, who had allegedly indicated in the first place that restarting the round was out of the question.

"It sucks that it happened, but this was the ESL's fault," he told HLTV.org. "At first, our manager went over to talk to them and see what's up and the ESL said the rules say the rounds stand, because we cannot go back like 40 seconds and see what would have really happened.

"Changing the money situation would have probably messed the game up a little bit, so they told us, 'the match is gonna stay as it is' and 30 minutes of arguing later, fnatic somehow got the admins to agree that if we agreed, we would replay the round with $5k for both teams.

"That just made us look like the bad guys, admins should not be doing that and putting the blame on us instead, it sucks that it happened but I still feel like we were the better team in that match."

The victory against fnatic put Evil Geniuses at the top of group, together with mousesports and Frag eXecutors, with Kovanen reckoning that a place in the knock-out stage is a possibilty.

"I think mouz is going to be harder, at least for us to play against, than fnatic, so I would say they are our biggest threat, I think all the teams are definitely beatable in our group, we beat both FX and mTw at Arbalet Cup, if we just play well and then wrap a win against oXmoze then anything is possible," he concluded.

You can follow HLTV.org's coverage of the Extreme Masters World Championship Finals here.

(责任编辑：case drop)