Following T1’s devastating defeat to Gen.G in the Worlds 2025 Swiss Stage, head coach kkOma and coach Mata offered assessments of what went wrong, from draft misreads to execution struggles.
For Mata, the problems for T1 started in the drafting phase. “We lost because we drafted poorly. I feel very sorry for the players,” Mata said in an interview with FOMOS. The team’s decision to leave Orianna open drew attention, but Mata explained it was a calculated gamble. “We were aware Orianna is a top-tier pick,” he explained. “But as the red side we’re constrained on bans, so the plan was to trade a meta pick for priority elsewhere.”
That plan revolved around a Wukong-Aurora combination meant to break Gen.G’s scaling composition. While T1 drafted that composition, Duro’s Poppy ensured T1’s mobility was restricted in teamfights, which, in hindsight, “turned out to be an error.”
T1 found themself boxed in at Worlds 2025. Mata said they “felt short on bans. “They discussed banning Poppy to make their team’s time better on the Rift, but they had to ban other important champions, so they made that trade-off.
The red side again proved problematic for T1 to navigate. “As the 4th seed, we’re almost guaranteed to start on red, and our red-side drafts have been tough,” Mata admitted. He said the patch’s fast pace rewards early strength and complete compositions, key factors in deciding matches this tournament.
Their ban phase and the Kai’Sa pick followed similar reasoning: targeting Gen.G’s bot lane options while securing a reliable engage threat for Gumayusi. T1 went hard on their engage comp to take down the enemy Corki, but Gen.G outscaled T1 in the early game, preventing Gumayusi from getting the resources he needed to carry the match as the ADC.
Head coach kkOma echoed that T1’s draft left them little room to maneuver. “Compared to them, we had fewer outs this game,” he said in an interview with OSEN, stating that playing with composure was difficult as the draft was rough. While the team tried to get leads on the side lanes, Gen.G kept pressuring the squad for objectives, which didn’t go in T1’s way. Kk0ma also admitted that T1 need to adapt to the meta quickly as the event approaches the business end.
Despite the disappointment, both coaches emphasized resilience. “This heavy defeat actually made what we need to fix clearer,” kkOma said. “It’s only over when there are no matches left.”
With two consecutive losses, T1 will face 100 Thieves next on their road to the Knockout Stage.
