Danish cyber athlete Ismail «refrezh» Ali, who joined the MAD Lions in 2020, gave an interview to HLTV, talking about how his career has evolved in recent years. He showed brightly at the end of 2018, successfully competing at the BLAST Pro Series Lisbon with Cloud9. After that he started playing for OpTic, but after less than a year he found himself in the reserves without making much progress. For some time he stayed out of the media spotlight and did not play in major competitions, but in 2020 refrezh managed to return first to local and then to international cybersport: by the end of the year he took a place in the MAD Lions, one of the strongest Danish teams, and made a significant contribution to its victory in one of the Flashpoint league tournaments.
Ismail Ali said that after leaving OpTic, he had doubts about whether he should continue his professional career. One of the reasons for the problems then was that his style of play didn't agree with the approach the team's coach was suggesting. After being sent to the reserves, the player continued to train on his own and was willing to return to a lower level of tournaments to find new opportunities with the team. He eventually came to the attention of the Copenhagen Flames in early 2020, and that paved the way for him to play in major competitions. Later in his time with the MAD Lions refrezh has performed well and hopes to reach the top 20 in the HLTV rankings in 2021.
