CSGO pro Aleksi ‘allu’ Jalli sparked a bit of controversy when he discussed his teammate Jere ‘sergej’ Salo’s leaving ENCE for military service in an interview with HLTV.
When Allu sat down for an interview on HLTV’s Twitch channel on Monday, December 14, he probably wasn’t expecting to set off a social media firestorm, but that’s exactly what ended up happening.
Roughly 50 minutes into the interview, the topic of Sergej leaving CSGO for his compulsory military service in Finland came up, and Allu shared his thoughts on why his teammate made the choice.
“In the Spring we already took a one-month break for him, to maybe get him motivation, to maybe get his things going on, and it wasn’t enough,” allu said in the interview. “He still tried and played with us for six months and really tried to make it work, really much respect.”
Sergej didn’t take too kindly to this, and fired back on twitter saying people shouldn’t take everything allu said “as granted” while the interview was still going on.
“I wouldn’t take everything what @alluCSGO said/says as granted. He isn’t as simple and harmless persona as it may look,” sergej wrote on Twitter. “There’s a reason he’s the only one left in the team from the original roster.”
That initial tweet got, as expected, a ton of attention in the CSGO world, but the former Finnish pro said he wouldn’t be talking about it anymore as it was a “mental health thing” but promised that “old teammates can back up my tweet, though.”
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https://twitter.com/sergej_cs/status/1338583573570392067?s=20
Remember how we said that sergej tweeted that out during the broadcast, well the HLTV hosts decided to crank up the pressure and asked for allu’s thoughts on his former teammate’s response during the show.
“I can always say, obviously I’ve made mistakes, not always been the best teammate, this is correct,” allu replied. “But what else can I say? I don’t know.”
ENCE has been, from an outside perspective at least, practically falling apart at the seams over the last year, with the cutting of Aleksi ‘Aleksib’ Virolainen in early 2020 sending the team into a “death spiral,” according to Richard Lewis, and this latest drama doesn’t seem to help things either.
Lewis has also suggested that Sergej being willing to go and complete his service when he could get an exemption at 18 for being an esports pro, after being one of the best young players in the world “tells you all you need to know about what is going on in ENCE right now.”
On the other hand, allu seemed pretty optimistic about ENCE headed forward into 2021 throughout the full interview, and, despite this last-minute drama to end the year off with, fans will still be waiting to see what the org can do with a new, hopefully stable lineup come 2021.