The Tough Bananas caused a stir-up in May as they swooshed past 4-figure salary teams in the joinDOTA Masters to claim the eighth edition of the tournament. In the starting round of the second division of GosuLeague, they came off to a great start going 2-0 to top their group.
GosuGamers caught Banana captain Andreas "Balsam" Løchte just before the quintet gathered up in Copenhagen for a bootcamp session to bulk up in time for DreamHack.
How have the past few days been for you and your team?
- "I gotta admit that we were a bit sad about not being able to compete for a trip to Seattle, but shit happens, apart from that it's going great!"
You defeated Jordanian team YoungRebelz in the first round of GosuLeague. Talk us through the two games, which key points in the game would you say gave you the win? Were you happy in how the picks turned out?
- "We got the heroes we wanted and from then on the game was pretty easy. Game 2 gave a bit more troublesome with some kamikaze attempts from our Earthshaker followed by rage buy-backs, but when we pulled our shit together it was a fairly easy game."
Catch the games from GosuLeauge: TTB vs. yR Game 1, TTb vs. yR Game 2
Your next opponent in the GosuLeague is French team BLAST. What do you know about them, and will you guys do anything special to prepare?
- We've played some games against them, haven't lost yet, so we'll just do what we've done in earlier games and hopefully it's enough to win once again.
What are your goals for the GosuLeague? Is Division 1 a reasonable goal for you?
- Yeah that's the plan at least! But time will tell, strong teams everywhere!
Despite the team's solid results, The Tough Bananas are just a bunch of friends, with no sponsorship backing. But Løchte tells us that they will most likely sign some sponsors after their DreamHack trip. How big, well, that depends on their performance. But with the Masters victory in their backs, nothing's impossible for the yellow benders.
For the DreamHack Corsair Vengance Cup, the team will be playing with Sylvester "Link" Hoelgaard, who was a part of the successful Danish quintet playing for SK-Gaming together with Banana player Alexander 'CalculuS' Rathcke. This after the typical summer LAN killer - exams.
- "The roster is excellent, the chemistry in the team is awesome, unfortunately neNo couldn't make it to DreamHack because of exams, so yeah, Link will be our fifth player at DreamHack."
