Mid-season Negotiations 2009
The 4-4-2 is going well. Not great. Not spectacular. Won 1, Lost 1, Drawn 2. I haven’t scored many goals, but I’ve conceded a few less as well. That was the idea.
Negotiations. I’m playing games at such a rate that they seem to come around every day. Here in my third mid-season Negotiations, again without much in the way of transfer funds, I’ve made the following deals:
DONADEL (CMF, 26) – traded for Van den Berg (good riddance).
BRAMBLE (CB, 28) – traded for Rommedahl (ditto).
BOYD (CF, 26) – traded for Ordaz (not good enough often enough to justify keeping him any longer).
Towards the end of the negotiations period I received an offer for Ettori, another of the Default players who has been nothing but a burden to me. Nothing but albatrosses, the lot of ‘em (Macco slightly excepted). I sold Ettori for a very welcome 3100 points, and resisted the tempation to spend it in the market. I’ll play with what I have for now.
Bramble could be a key signing for me. An experienced player with stats to match. In real life he’s considered a bit of a joke defender, but this is a computer game, not life. PES2008 has some kind of ‘fan popularity’ thing relating to players. I haven’t really taken any notice of it yet, but there’s a letter A next to his name in the post-match screens. Everyone else has C or D. I think this means he really is a key signing. I hope there’s a knock-on effect that’ll boost the team’s performance. I really must read that section of the manual properly later.
Bramble is replacing Mattsson in the First XI.
The other new boys can fill in as required, along with the rest of the squad.
With a bit of defensive discipline and some ruthlessness up front, I’d still be in with a shot at promotion this season. It’s a long shot, admittedly, and in my mind I’m resigned to spending the 2010 season still in Division 2…
But what kind of attitude is that? I could do this.
Just to say you’ve got a great blog here and i am reading it all the time, my own pes2008 master leauge is not going so well, im currently W4 D4 L18, however my last 2 matches have been an improvement with schwarz scoring a hat-trick to beat the league leaders 3-2 then ordaz scoring 4 to beat Hammarby 4-1.
Keep up the good work
Thanks Ben, and you’ve reminded me that Ordaz was never all bad for me. I’ve got a replay somewhere from my first season of Ordaz executing a lovely overhead flick (not a kick: a *flick*!) into the net. For me, though, none of the Default players are any good simply because they’re so easily dispossessed while running and they can’t turn 180 degrees without losing the ball. Plugging away at the ML with the default players feels like a real slog at times but the game feels all the sweeter once you finally turn things around.
I agree that the players never seem to turn 180 degrees without giving the ball away, i find that small 90 degree turns work best when attacking. Im only 3/4 of the way through my first season and with an uneventful first negotiation period (just schwarz) im happy to be winning a few games. pes 2008’s master league has really pulled me in much more than pes 5 or 6 as it is much more of a challenge.
If I had my time again with the Default players in the first season, there’s no way I’d play a 4-3-3. I got away with it on other PESes but PES2008 is just too hard with them.
IF I ever restart Master League (and that’s a big IF – I really do usually play the one career all year long) I’m going to go 4-5-1 or something like that. I figure it’d be better to have nine 0-0s in a row than lose nine games in a row as I did at one stage in my first season.
i have always struggled to find the right formation for the defualt players, at first i started with 4-5-1 with 2 DMF’s and played the back 4 all as CB’s but i found that i still conceded goals. Now i’m onto 4-4-2 with the two side backs playing as sidebacks and as well as scoring more goals i tend to concede less as well which seems strange to me. However i find that it does tend to tire the side backs out more.
Sidebacks in this game are the worst I’ve ever known them IMO. My two at the moment – Guimaraes and Klavan – will frequently just wander over to the centre for no apparent reason. Seabass himself is on record that this kind of thing is solely down to the player, but I’m dubious about that. It could just be another of the game’s infamous spanners in the human player’s works.
Seabass is completely full of shit on this topic along with a number of his other dubious assertations (“There is no scripting,” “the ML does not get harder in the second half of the season”) that are completely disproved by experience.
^ Although I should say, playing players in the SB role with high defense (74+), low attack (50-) and low aggression (60-) has done the trick. They don’t stay wide (the fuckers), but they do stay home.