PES Chronicles

Winning the title last season triggered a cascade of cash, an avalanche of bounty, a tidal wave of credit, a hurricane of moolah, a tsunami of dosh. I could go on there, but I won’t. It’s safe to say that I’m rich now, richer than I’ve ever been so far in this Master League career. I got £15,000,000 for winning the league. I got another £10,000,000 or so from new and renewed sponsorship deals. I got a bonus couple of million from the fan club.

With all that money swilling around it might be expected that I’d bring in a ton of great new players for season 11 and my first Treble attempt. But no. Something confusing happened with Expected Earnings, again. After upgrading a few of my backroom staff, I slapped in a few bids for some 90 OVR-rated players—a CB and a DMF. The combined transfer fee would have been around £6,000,000. Expected Earnings duly took this bid into account when reckoning my final balance, giving me a figure of -£1,000,000 or so. This triggered those warnings you get from the game that you’re about to run into debt.

I was utterly confused. I’ve never made big transfer bids before. I was unsure about what was going on. I suppose I couldn’t believe I was as rich as I was. I lowered my team staff levels right back down to where they were, and waited until the end of the transfer window. My two bids for the players were refused. I was too worried to make new ones for other players. Wages and costs were paid… and it turned out that I was still about £7,000,000 in credit. Expected Earnings had caused me to mess up a transfer window yet again.

So I go into season 11 with exactly the same squad that won the title last season. This is a good thing in one way—there are no new players to dilute the team-work pool. But with Europe coming up, my squad feels pretty lightweight. I’ll line up a few top signings for the mid-season window, and hope my season is still alive at that stage.

My annual change of kits saw me decide to alter the horizontally striped home kit that I loved so much last season. I wish I hadn’t changed it now. I really did love it. I’ll be going back to them stripes next season. For this season I made the stripes wider and adopted black shorts. For the away kit I chose a red strip with white trimmings. I’ve just noticed that I picked different shades of red for the shirts and shorts. Ooops. Thankfully, in PES2010 you don’t have to wait until the end of a season to fix mistakes like that.

Season 11 got underway, and the short news is: I’m struggling. Badly. I’m playing terribly. I’ve had odd good games, but not enough to make my current league position—13th after 7 matches—anything but an embarrassment. We’re supposed to be the champions…

At least I haven’t fumbled the Treble just yet. I squeezed through the first round of the Cup, against Arsenal, thanks to a lucky away goal. But things are precarious in the second round. River Plate are my opponents and after the first leg at my ground I’m 1-2 down on aggregate. It’ll be tough at their place. I’ve got to score twice to have any chance at all.

None of this post-title-winning struggle is unprecedented for me. Thinking back, all the best Master Leagues—PES5’s, of course, in particular—has thrown me a curveball in the first season after big success. I can vividly recall a season on PES5 where I flirted with relegation immediately after a superb title-winning campaign. This iffy start to season 11 is a good sign that ML is back to its classic best.

The Champions League has started. I’ve played one match in the group stage, against Juventus. I was ridiculously proud to see my Coventry City team—my Coventry City team!—lining up beforehand, and the music, and the lights… The match itself was a minor disaster. I lost 1-3 at home.

Juventus steamrollered me. They were 0-2 up before half time. I was totally on the back foot, and couldn’t seem to do anything to stop the relentless waves of attacks. I got a lucky goal back after the break to give me some hope of recovery, but they scored a killer third goal soon after that.

And so I had lost my opening game. It’s a weird Champions League group: myself, Juventus, Manchester City, and Aberdeen. I hate seeing Man City there, not just because they’re a good team—and they will be tough—but because they’re from my own league.

Finally I have to show this very interesting goal scored by the AI. I rarely show goals by the AI, but this was something very special. When I looked closely at the replay I could hardly believe it. This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this from the AI in a PES game:

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Season 10 has concluded in the way it seemed destined to from the start: I have won the Division 1 championship. I was very happy. I’m still very happy now. It’s been a long old slog getting to this point—seven hard seasons of graft in the lower division, followed by a tricky adjustment to the top flight. Winning the title now has come along at just the right time. I’m ready to start challenging for more trophies. I’m looking forward to taking my team into the Champions League. This title win—my first trophy in PES2010’s Master League—now opens up a whole new level of competition. I can go for the Treble!

Here’s the final Division 1 table in full:

As seen last time, my position heading into the final few matches was a very healthy one. Really all I had to do was keep doing what I’d been doing all season, and the title would be mine. I could even afford a few slip-ups. As it turned out, the slip-ups never came (not until after I’d won the title anyway—more on that later).

It turned out that the truly decisive games came against Birmingham and then Sunderland. Against Birmingham I went ahead 1-0. And they scored an auto-goal from the kick-off to equalise. I absolutely hate it when this happens in PES2010. It often feels literally impossible to me to stop the AI scoring. When it’s an AI kick-off I already put the ATT/DEF levels on full defence, and also employ the strategy button ‘All-out Defence’ option, but it does no good. Nothing has any effect when the AI really wants to score. I know, I know: I need to defend better and try not to double-sprint-pressure (or clamp) my way out trouble. I’ll crack it one day.

I came back to win the Birmingham game with a very untidy, scrambled goal not long before the end. There were only a few matches left and I was five points clear in first place.  A win in my next match against Sunderland, and the title was mine. Sunderland have been a bogey team for me in next-gen PES. I won, though, with a few standard goals from standard attack patterns that felt so very, very good to score.

The run-in was enlivened by the occurrence of two similar long-range goals in the same match, one after the other. They’re at the start of the short clip below. It also shows my team’s title-clinching celebrations after the Sunderland game. Right at the end of the following clip is an AI goal scored against me by my final opponents of the season, the already-relegated and now invincible Bolton Wanderers. They turned up with absolutely nothing to play for, but played like the greatest team ever, and thumped me 4-1. Their fourth goal is the one included at the end. Smiling at my ‘defending’ is allowed…

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Also notable in the clip is a moment during my team’s locker-room celebrations. My created player, not-Greg, the team captain (of course) clearly decides he’s fed up of the whole scene. He walks away from the celebration without so much as a by-your-leave. It made me laugh out loud at first viewing because it’s eerily close to exactly how I would be in a situation like that in real life. Sure, lads, I’ll jump up and down like a girl with you for a few moments, but then I’m OUT of here…

And so onto season 11. And my first attempt at the Treble.

Finally for this season, I have a compilation of every goal scored by me during the campaign. That’s every single one. I was knocked out of the Cup in the second round. The goals I scored in the first round appear near the start of this video. The rest are all league goals.

As will be seen, I do score plenty of goals that aren’t long-range screamers. PES2010 continues the proud tradition of enabling many routes to goal. Throughout the movie, there are only two occasions when two similar goals follow one another: once, as we have already seen above, with two long-rangers in the same match; and another time when I scored two almost identical side-footed finishes against West Ham. I think this is an intriguing video, and it’s an experiment I will be carrying out again in a few seasons’ time, possibly including every AI goal as well. I hope you enjoy.

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Heading now into the final stretch of season 10, my Coventry City are a good bet to win the Division 1 title. I’m still top after 33 matches. The only thing counting against me is a continuing lack of goals. I win most matches 1-0 or 2-1. 3-0 results just don’t happen for me. They’re a once-a-season affair, if that. But if I can go on getting my one or two goals per game whilst shutting out the opposition, I will win this title. That’s a certainty. Ah, but as the old saying goes, there’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip…

Last time I spoke about an epic match against Porto that I won 3-2 in the last seconds of stoppage time. The return fixture against them went suspiciously similarly. With a few seconds of stoppage time left I was leading 2-1, and really not under threat, but they forced their equaliser with no time left at all. The match ended 2-2, and it really felt bizarrely like Porto’s deliberate response to my exploits in the first match. Almost as if the AI was delivering a droll meta-commentary on the narrative of the season so far. I know, I need to get out more.

I experienced much better results against the other top teams in the division. Once again I played Chelsea, Man Utd, Arsenal, and Liverpool one after the other, this time winning 3 matches and drawing 1 of them.

My former top striker, Sazi, has seen a remarkable dip in form. He no longer feels like a particularly important player to me. I can leave him out without much regret. Last season he was my main man and to play without him was a minor martyrdom. I have spent £2m on upgrading his player skill cards: first touch, and quick turn. But he’s dropped a couple of OVR rating points (78>76) and become a bit of a spare wheel. Of course, whilst undergoing special training, a player doesn’t take part in ordinary training. That could account for the wobble.

But I think it’s more likely due to my change in formation. Sazi’s dip coincided with my adoption of a new, more tightly-packed 4-3-3. Before, when my formation featured Sazi as an isolated central striker, he was always involved. Now? Now he’s fairly anonymous, and has dropped back in the pecking order behind my other two main strikers, Zaki and Itzhaki. (Incidentally, note the peculiar assonance of my strikers’ names: SAZI, ZAKI, ITZHAKI, SAZI… I really don’t get out much.)

I also paid a cool £1m to give Itzhaki the first touch skill card. This is all money I can only afford to pay if I win the title, I suspect. No pressure. Unlike Sazi, Itzhaki’s grown in importance to the team. He’s grabbed a few important goals that will be seen in my end-of-season goals bonanza. (It’ll feature EVERY goal I have scored this season. That’s every single goal, no matter how humble, no matter how ordinary. All in one video. That’ll be on Friday.)

Looking at that table, and knowing how well I’m playing (if not scoring as many as I’d like), I feel that I will win this title. In a way that might strangely disappoint me. After two ninth-place finishes, to go straight to first-place finish without any intervening stage suggests the passing of a threshold. What if I start to find the game as easy as many other people find it? I don’t want that stage ever to come.

During the current batch of games, I have this one goal to show off before Friday’s video extravaganza. Zaki, my new main man, is the scorer:

Link:

What I loved about this goal was that I did exactly what I tried to do. As the ball dropped I thought, “Right, I want to just clip this across the keeper high into the opposite side of the net…” And that’s what happened.

February? I’ve said it before, but—what is happening to time lately? Weren’t we greeting the arrival of PES2010 and FIFA10 just last week or something?

Now it won’t be too long—two months? three months?—before the buildup to the 2011 games begins. The World Cup this year may alter the publicity calculus a little. Will Konami and EA start the hype earlier or later than usual? They could go either way, I suppose. A lot depends on whether they’ve got a World Cup game to promote as well. We know that EA definitely will have a WC game.

When the PES2011 and FIFA11 hype machine does get going, certain things are guaranteed. We’ll see underwhelming screenshots. Then there’ll be the now-traditional, utterly pointless FMV video of Messi or somebody doing a trick or—if we’re lucky—tricks. Plural! Why do football game makers insists on trailing everything about a football game EXCEPT what we most want to see—i.e., ordinary gameplay? Why must we sit through several months of flicks and tricks and nutmegs and lollipops and crap like that, instead of seeing (for example) just a few seconds of ordinary gameplay, say a passing move through midfield leading to a standard shot on goal? Does any other game genre gloss over its core experience so thoroughly for so long during its pre-release cycle?

Anyway. Season 10 in my Master League. PES2010. Here and now.

Last time, I was lightheaded at being top of the table and looking fairly good after 12 matches. Here we go with the next stage of the season. I’ve played another 10 matches, and I’ve passed through the mid-season transfer window.

I experimented with a new formation. 4-3-3 has been my favoured formation in PES for 10 years now (where does that time go?). But this year I’ve found goals harder to come by than before, and it is with regret that I finally acknowledged the 4-3-3—with wide AMFs, and widely-spaced CFs—has run its course. I needed an alternative.

I played 5 of the next 10 matches using a 4-5-1 (pictured left) and then with a version of 4-4-2. The experiment did not go well.

I lost 3 and drew 2—my worst run for a few seasons. I scored just 1 goal in those 5 matches. My rise up the table has been built on pass and move, patience, and being willing to defend 1-0 leads for long periods. With the new formation, I couldn’t pass, could barely move, and I seemed to be defending all the time anyway, whatever the circumstances. Everything that had hoisted me up to the top of the table felt missing. There was no flow.

I had to take remedial action before my fledgling title challenge was seriously compromised. (As it was, I’d do well to recover.) I soon went back to a version of 4-3-3, albeit one tempered by my experiences. The new formation can be seen below at the top of the new squad picture. It handles very much like a 4-5-1 at times, with lots of bodies in midfield. Although it looks narrow, in practice it doesn’t play that way. I adjusted my sliders to favour width. My players seem to go wide when I want them wide, and go narrow when I want them narrow. I had instant success with the new 4-3-3, to counterbalance the poor results. I’m still a bit short on goals, though. The 4-5-1 experiment is by no means over. Long-term, I believe I’ll settle for a 4-4-2 with a diamond midfield. For now I’ve got the above 4-5-1 mapped to a strategy button, and I still activate it for long periods when I feel I need to calm a game down.

My possession stats lately have been extraordinary. In one match against River Plate I had 75% possession at half-time, but ended the match with ‘only’ 69%—and I conceded a typical late goal. But that’s PES for you.

In mid-season I indulged in quite a bit of activity. I bought yet another WF/SS hybrid player, SCOKLANT, for a few hundred thousand. I got rid of my calamity goalkeeper, Jan Kun Mu, who brought in £1.5m. I replaced him with a lanky Free Agent keeper called ZUBERBUHLER, who I negotiated with back in the first weeks of the season. He’s been great since his arrival.

Also in the Free Agents list I found a CF, 85 OVR, named ZAKI… I’ve had nothing but great players from the Free Agents list recently. Why do I even need to look at the proper transfer market? Is this a slight flaw in the new Master League? Only more time will tell. As I (hopefully) get more successful and accumulate more money over the next few seasons, I’ll be able to buy top players on the regular transfer market—if I want to.

The failed experiment with 4-5-1 cost me a few league places, but look here: after 22 matches, almost 2/3rds of the season, I’m still in 4th place, and just 2 points behind the leaders. After everything that’s happened in this long old career, I’ve got to be happy with that. And I am happy.