PES Chronicles

And just like that, it was all over. The Treble is gone, and maybe the title too.

I’m out of both Cups and I don’t think I can win the league title this season. With 9 matches left in the season, I’m 12 points adrift. Porto are dominant once more:

Unless the game really pulls out all the stops and lets me catch up, I won’t win a single thing this season. What happened?

The collapse started after I lost my main striker, Zaki, to injury. It was just before the transfer window, and I slapped in bids for 5 talented young Regen strikers: Forlan, Morientes, Crespo, Owen, and Van Nistelrooy. Morientes was the first to respond—and the deal was on! The price was high, but I didn’t think twice. I needed a special striker. I bought him for £26,000,000. This was from my entire budget of £28,000,000. I recouped most of it almost immediately by selling my young DMF, Clement, for £23,000,000. That was a (suspiciously timely) relief. I’d have really struggled to pay all the bills at the end of the season otherwise.

Morientes, a Regen, is currently aged 22 and rated 86 OVR. His first few games were unremarkable, but he got a few goals in his next few games. And after that I struggled to score any goals with any player at all for a run of about 10 matches. It was a critical period in which to suffer a goal drought.

I just couldn’t score. Nothing would happen. Typically my match stats were something like 15-20 shots on goal, with 7-10 of them on target. I swear I hit the post/crossbar at least twice in about five matches running.

It all cost me dearly. In the D1 Cup I battled my way through to the semi-final and played Manchester United. They battered me in the first leg at my place. I lost 0-2. At their place I needed an early goal, but I got nothing. This game is very good at smothering the life out of you when it’s in the mood to do so, and it was in the mood. I lost that away leg 1-0. It was 3-0 on aggregate. And that was that.

It was a spookily similar tale in the Champions League. For the fourth season in a row I was up against French opposition in the second round. This time it was Lyon. The first leg at my place ended 0-0. I thought that was a good result. One goal at their place would effectively win me the tie—that’s the power of the away goal. But I didn’t get it. They got two goals, instead, and won 2-0.

I was, and am, shell-shocked at the collapse of my season after I lost Zaki to injury. It’s all a perfect model of what can happen when a team loses a key player and fails to deal with it. Could this game, this much-maligned PES2010, really be so finely tuned? Or is it all down to me? Is it all psychological, nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy—a manifestation of my deepest fears about what losing Zaki would mean for my season?

Whatever the case, at least Zaki is now back. His injury lasted three in-game months. I have checked his stats and he doesn’t seem to have lost anything. He’s still 81-rated. For these last 9 matches I’ve reinstalled him as my main central striker. (Morientes’ time will come—at the moment he feels a little unfinished.)

All I’ve got left to go for is the league title. It’s probably way out of reach—but with Master League, you never know.

I’ve now played until the mid-season transfer window in season 14. I’ve only just gone top of the table. It’s the first time I’ve been top all season. For a change I’ll post the full mid-season Division 1 table:

Burnley have faded after being a strong force last season. Chelsea have rallied well after being poor last season and at the start of this season. But look who’s in the bottom 3: Liverpool. It’s shocking to see them there, even if it’s only in the cartoony make-believe football world of ML.

In the Champions League things were not straightforward. I drew and lost my opening two matches of the qualifying group. Then I won three on the bounce to secure the second qualifying spot with a game to spare. I simmed the meaningless final fixture against Rosenborg, which the game determined was a 3-3 draw.

The draw for the next round has been made. For the 4th season in a row, my first opponents in the knockout stage are French. This time it’s Olympique Lyonnais. Over the past three seasons at this stage of the competition, I’ve faced FC Sochaux, RC Lens, and Stade Rennais. What are the odds of this kind of draw happening 4 seasons in a row?

I’m still in the Division 1 Cup. (I have a feeling about this season. I hope I’m not tempting fate—I probably am—but I can smell a Treble. It all feels right.)

My second round opponents in the D1 Cup were Spurs. They’re currently not the D1 superpower they were a few seasons ago, but they’re still tricky to play against. However I beat them very easily in both legs, 3-0 both times. I even failed to notice that the second leg was a Cup match until it was over.

Just before the mid-season transfer window, I suffered a terrible blow. Zaki, my main striker, picked up an injury that’ll effectively keep him out for the rest of the season. Zaki has been an integral part of my team over the past few seasons. He’s actually lost a point or two of OVR rating, and he’s 31 now, but he’s still a great striker. I came within a whisker of winning the Golden Boot with him last season.

So I mourned Zaki for a few minutes (he’s unlikely to be the same player after the injury, and will probably be sold). Then I went and slapped in panic transfer bids for five top young strikers (pictured left). I doubt I’ll be successful in getting any of them. I could be left to make do with what I’ve got – which would not be too bad actually. Bamen Roberk, your time may be at hand.

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I was looking through some old stuff the other day and came across my PES5 videos. Among the goals I recorded at the time (using MaxDrive to transfer from PS2 to PC!) was one in particular that I always think of first in the general category of ‘your most favourite-ever PES goal, ever’. It came in Master League (of course). The scorer was Bergkamp:

Link:

What makes a great goal? It’s at least partly subjective, perhaps mostly so. Some people salivate over the Argentina ‘team goal’ from Germany 2006. I failed to see, and still fail to see, why so much fuss was made about it. Tellingly, few people today would instantly think of it when asked to recall great World Cup goals. Oh, I know that it was a technical marvel, and I love to score goals like it in computer games myself. But Maxi Rodriguez’s showbiz volley later in the same tournament was a genuinely great goal, IMO.

I love my PES5 Bergkamp goal. I’ve scored plenty of memorable goals before and since, but none  have yet occupied the special place in my memory that this one does.

So far, my PES2010 Master League adventure has been notable for the lack of big-name players I’ve been able to acquire for my team. It’s very unlike previous versions of the mode, where you could equip yourself pretty much at will with all the Ronaldos and Platinis and whoever else took your fancy.

Up to this point, starting season 14, my best players have mostly been home-grown, or players that aren’t really household names in real-life. Amir Zaki and Pedro Munitis have been amazing for me. Nakamura has been evergreen from the first season he arrived. He’s currently 28 years old and has just hit the 90 OVR rating mark. My own ‘not-Greg’ created player has been an important midfielder. And I’ve had many, many talents come up from the Youth team and establish themselves—players like Sazi, McCann, Cejumi, and Capuano, to name just a few.

For just one example: CAPUANO. I signed him from the Youth team as a 17-year-old rated around 65 OVR. Look at him now, aged 24. I’ll never sell him. Well, perhaps an offer in the region of £100m would give me something to think about, but for anything less than that, the answer’d be NO. He’s got some growing to do yet. I’m going to retrain him to add AMF to his repertoire of positions. I’ll retool his focus training accordingly and beef up his shooting and dribbling. I’m genuinely excited to see how it all turns out. Will it wreck what he already is? I won’t know unless I try.

Those of us who’ve always played Master League love it for the in-depth immersion and sense of involvement with the team that it brings as part of the overall package. PES2010’s all-new Master League  is delivering on this front in bucketloads. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for me Master League is PES.

Okay, time to stop gushing and get on with season 14. I changed both kits. Home: a dark ‘Croatia-style’ kit. Away: a yellowy ‘Galatasaray-style’ kit.

Once again I’ve had minimal activity in the pre-season transfer market. After wages and costs I had £20,000,000 to play with. I tried again for Scholes, Pirlo, etc., as I have done for the last four or five transfer windows now. But none of them would come to me.

I think it’s a flaw in the otherwise excellent new transfer system that I have no real idea why some players won’t sign. I am left to guess that it’s due to my relatively low club ranking. Currently I’m only 50th in the ML world, and presumably those players want to go somewhere more prestigious. That’s fine. A few Cups, ideally a few Doubles or Trebles, should soon fix that. And it’s not as if I’m aching to get hold of the big names. I’m having possibly my best-ever Master League experience with the players I can get. Who needs Scholes & co.? Not me. (But it would be nice, anyway.)

With nobody signing up, then, I settled for recruiting one new player from the Youth team. GATTUSO is the player in question, and obviously I expect great things from him in the future.

In the League, I navigated my way very carefully indeed through the opening round of the D1 Cup. I’ve been eliminated at this stage two seasons in a row. Maximum focus and concentration. AEK Athens, at home, first leg: beat them 2-0, easily. Second leg was a predictable torrid affair that I always felt I was struggling to maintain any semblance of control in. 0-0 it finished. I am through to the second round for the first time in 3 seasons. The Treble is still on.

Patchy form in the League. Now that I’m pretty much always in the hunt for the title, I’ll stop posting screenshots of the league table in every post until things get interesting near the end of the season. Having a league table picture in every post is a bit much, and largely pointless. I’m currently 5th after 7 matches with a record of W3 D2 L1. One of the victories was a momentous 6-1 drubbing of Spurs, who are still a top side in my ML world, so it was a notable victory indeed. Spurs’ First XI is starting to look very weird—as they all are, really:

In Europe, there’s a familiar look and feel to my Champions League group. The other teams are Juventus, Helsinki, and Rosenborg. I was up against Rosenborg last year, and this is now the third time in four seasons that I’ve faced Juventus in the CL group stage. The campaign hasn’t started very well, either. I was 2-0 up at home against Juve but shipped two late goals to only draw 2-2. That felt bad enough, but then I lost 4-1 away to Rosenborg. Their four goals included this extraordinary own-goal from my defender, Carragher—or was it an own-goal?

Link:

It certainly looked and felt, at the time, like an own goal. My keeper’s non-reaction supports this: his lack of any kind of response is typical of the code not knowing what to do. It happened durng a period of play where I was getting very frustrated, which for me always means lots of clamping and button-mashing. Here I was mashing the slide-tackle button, trying desperately to stop what felt like irresistible AI momentum towards my goal. I saw my power meter charge up just before the kick happened, which makes me think the game deemed Carragher to have the ball under his control for a split second, and this really was an own-goal. But the second replay suggests the AI player’s foot was in there, doing something…

Whatever happened, whoever kicked it, I was very unhappy with my keeper. Zuberbuhler still is a good keeper, overall, but he’s started showing these moments of eccentricity that are costing me. It might really be time for Regen Buffon to claim the No. 1 shirt, or at least occupy it for a while. I’m undecided.

Season 13 has ended. I’ve really zipped through this one. The League was safe. I won it for the fourth time in a row. The latter part of the season was all about my Champions League adventure. Unlike last season and the season before, I had a decent run in the knockout stages. No, I have not won the thing, but I got as far as the semi-final this time. Here is a very brief highlights package—including, at the end, a really awful goal that helped to knock me out:

Link:

My first knockout opponents were Stade Rennais. It was really scary given that at the same stage in two previous seasons I’ve been eliminated by supposedly minor French sides. Indeed the first leg was one of the toughest matches I can ever remember playing in PES, ever. It really is the case that the AI’s speed and overall toughness gets ratcheted up in the knockout stages. Whether this is in keeping with real life or not is another debate.

Personally I like the added difficulty, but has there got to be so much SPEED? This is true for the whole game, not just in the Champions League sections of it. All last summer we heard great things about how PES2010 was finally a proper, grown-up, slowed-down effort. Again and again (and again), that was what the previewers said: PES2010 was a slow game. You get time on the ball. Rejoice!

But then the game came out and, speed-wise, it was a great disappointment. It’s often far too fast for it to be anything but a minus point in the overall scheme of things. Konami simply didn’t have the balls to stick with the code that was shown to previewers, something I hope those previewers will remember this coming summer. We can only hope that everybody holds onto their respective balls for PES2011.

So I beat Stade Rennais 2-1 at home, and then lost 1-2 at their place. With ten minutes to go, extra time was beckoning, but then I got the winner.

Next up in the quarter finals were Porto, my divisional rivals. They were absolute monsters. I thought the speed was 100mph against Stade Rennais; here, it felt more like 1000mph. Once again after two legs we were tied at 2-2, and this time I went into extra time. Penalties were just around the corner. I haven’t taken more than two penalties in all 13 seasons of Master League so far. I’ve never been in a penalty shootout. I didn’t fancy my chances. With seconds left I lobbed a hopeful aerial through-ball in the general direction of Munitis. One fortunate bounce later, I took a potshot, and the ball hit a defender’s knee and looped over the Porto keeper into the net… Yesssssss.

My semi-final opponents were a team called ZAR BLANCO/AZUL. I’d never heard of them before I met them here, although it seems they do have quite a profile in their native – er – where the hell are they from? Google is not my friend in this instance. It seems they’re from Pro Evolution Soccer land(?), although other results indicate… Uruguay? Can this be right?

That’s their First XI, on the left. They wore purple, or dark pink depending on your perspective, and just like their predecessors they were beasts to play against, only even more so.

I did well to limit the damage in the first leg at their place, which I lost 2-0. Once again the game felt as if it was on fast-forward. A million miles an hour. In the second leg, just as frantic and stupidly fast, I did get an early goal to give myself a massive chance. But as is so often the way with me and PES2010, I then conceded a goal straight from their kick-off. That was bad enough, but just seconds later I conceded yet another one, and it was the killer. It’s the final goal in the clip above, and it was a proper howler. The score was 1-3 on the day, 1-5 on aggregate. That’s how it ended.

In the League, I romped to the title with a few games to spare. The chief interest in the closing stages was whether I could win my first Golden Boot with Zaki. It wasn’t to be, sadly. I scored a few, but the AI player at the head of the queue did as well.

I won the title by 9 points, but my goals-scored tally was the worst it’s been for a few seasons. I’ll have to keep an eye on that situation and go hunting for a top striker if required. Here’s the full final league table—which shows an interesting turn of events for Manchester City, Chelsea, and Liverpool:

The team of the season was a nice bonus: my created player, ‘not-Greg’, won player of the year. I had three players in the overall Division 1 First XI. My two full-backs are both Youth team promotees. I’m proud of them. Proud!

And so that’s that. Season 13 done and dusted, on with season 14. Year 2022-2023. The quest for the Treble continues.