Team WE Coach Homme: 'I don’t want the players to be satisfied with their current form'

Despite being known in 2012 and 2013 as one the most dominant team in the world, Team WE have never made it to an LPL final — until this year. Upon qualifying for their first LPL final by beating out Oh My God in a 3-1 set, the team met with Chinese press to field questions.

After you had your comeback in the third game, how did you feel going into Game 4?

Su “xiye” Hanwei: Originally, in the third game, the enemy team had a really big lead, but we made the gold almost even before we lost. It wasn’t that big of a deal, I guess.

Since Nam “Ben” Donghyun has started in the support position, your early game has been very good, but mid game has had more mistakes. Coach Yoon “Homme” Sungyoung, what steps will you take to improve this problem?

Coach Homme: Since the team is still really young, there’s a lot of time to improve. They’re still learning.

xiye, in the second game, when you pressed the Zhonya’s active under turret, what happened?

xiye: I pressed the wrong button. I wanted to use Corrupting Potion, but I got them mixed up.

Han “Smlz” Jin is a very aggressive player in lane, but in the first and third games, you first picked Kog’Maw. In the laning phase, Kog’Maw is relatively weak, so why did you pick it?

Homme: Because when you get to late game with Kog’Maw, he teamfights very well. In addition, in the laning phase, we aren’t disadvantaged. Our players are also very strong.

In the third game, you were very far behind, but you managed to defend. How do you coordinate in these situations?

Xiang “Condi” Renjie: In that game, OMG had a very large lead, and it was hard to defend against their push. I actually really didn’t expect that we’d be able to defend so well.

Three years later, WE have managed to force themselves into the LPL final. Coach Homme, is there something you want to say to the players? What do you expect will be the result?

Homme: When I first came to this team, I discovered that the players are all very outstanding. As for the result, I don’t want the players to be satisfied with their current form and rather be inspired to fix existing problems. I expect that we will be much stronger going into the 2017 World Championship.

In the regular season, xiye was oppressed by Kim “Doinb” Taesang’s mid lane Karma many times. Today, you took MVP playing Karma mid. What instance made you decided to look into using this champion?

xiye: [Laughing] It didn’t give me a large impression like that. Last season I also played Karma mid.

Ben, you played Thresh twice today with very good results. How do you reflect on your performance?

Ben: In the early game, I played well. After mid game, it was just average.

Homme, can you predict who wins the match between EDG and RNG [Note: This press conference took place before the second semifinal began]?

Homme: I favor EDG a bit. Although RNG beat EDG in the regular season, EDG has started to play better recently. In the next series, I’ll pay most attention to the coach’s pick and ban and how they play the early game.

How do you assess OMG’s performance today?

Homme: OMG also played well today. We gained advantages in small skirmishes and slowly extended the gold lead to take the win.

Homme, did you expect today’s win?

Homme: When I first came to the team, I figured we’d more or less make semifinals. Now that we’ve made the final, I want to do even better.

In the quarterfinal, OMG reverse-swept I May, so when they won the third game from you, did you feel any anxiety?

Condi: We were fine. We knew we made small mistakes in Game 3, so if we make some adjustments, it should be fine.

You can follow Kelsey Moser on Twitter @karonmoser.