Mid-season negotiations 2010
Two draws and a defeat heading into the 2010 mid-season negotiations leaves me still perilously close to the drop zone. I need better players urgently. It would make a hell of a difference. I took a quick break to play the first few games of an International Tournament with the same formation as my ML team but with international-class players, and noticed the difference immediately. I could actually defend, for one thing. Scoring goals isn’t really my problem in Master League.
Needing and wanting better players is one thing; getting them is quite another.
Yet again I’m seriously hampered by my team ranking. My ranking is ‘D’. It’s been ‘D’ since the start. What this means is that I cannot even place bids for very good players. REJECTED is the word I see eight times out of ten after asking a club’s permission to negotiate.
A DMF with the Middle Shooting ability is #1 on the wish-list this time around. Nothing else matters. Donadel is still doing fine – not great as in the latter part of last season, but fine. Good enough. What he lacks is real bite in the tackle, and anything like a reliable pair of shooting boots.
I went for and got MUNTARI (traded for El Moubarki+5000 points).
I considered putting him straight into the First XI in place of Donadel. But it’s weird… I couldn’t do it. Muntari is the better player in almost every respect (not least his shooting), but Donadel did so much for my team last season that he has become like a talisman to me. And get this: if I dropped Donadel I’d feel that I would be betraying him. In other words I have formed a sentimental attachment to a virtual football player in a computer game. They do academic studies about this kind of thing.
ORELLANO is a famous old PES name.
I picked him up from the Youth list. He was a moody so-and-so in PES6 and wouldn’t come to me until he was about 26, despite just hanging around in the Unbelongings for season after season.
BRADLEY is another fresh face from the Youth list – a CMF/SMF with Middle Shooting. It’s called Shooting from Distance in the search menus but good old Middle Shooting in all other menus. Sigh.
And finally I got some geezer called DJIBA, another CMF/SMF player with Middle Shooting packed in his boots.
Amazingly I was able to trade Burchet+2000 points for him. Djiba’s not really very good (hence the low points price in the exchange), but he’ll be useful for trading up at another level if he doesn’t work out.
With the departure of El Moubarki and Burchet, I’m left with just three of the original Default squad: Ivarov, Stein and Huylens.
Ivarov plays in the odd game when Friedel and Kim U Don’t are both unfit, and he does well enough for me to keep him on at least until the end of this season. Stein will be good exchange fodder in the future. And Huylens is retiring at the end of this campaign.
I’m worried again that I might have wasted the mid-season negotiations. Of the four newcomers, only Muntari is likely to be of immediate use.
It’s usual for me to struggle in my first top-flight season, but this year I’m struggling slightly more than usual. I want to get some clear blue water between me and that relegation zone as soon as possible.
Relegation could be a positive thing. With a superior team and experience you *should* win the D2 cup and the league – picking up near-maximum points in most games. Your rating would go from a ‘D’ to a ‘B’/'A’ (im speaking from experience). Youd then have a good rating, lots of cash from consitent winning (bonus for top scorer, top finish, cup win) and a long negotiation period to bring in top players before starting in the top league again.
i just checked out Muntari, and he looks decent. I might pick him up myself lol. Whats his curve like?
I have shaw in my team also, but my god is he weak!… I was down 2-0 with 25mins left, took shaw off for makinwa (because shaw just couldnt penetrate the defense, he would get barged off the ball at first contact) and makinwa did the deed. i won 3-2, makinwa with 2 assists. what a huge difference balance makes
David – relegation would be a personal disaster after all these years of PES, but I take your point about it being a positive thing (I would have won D2 at a canter if I’d hit that promotion-winning form just five or so games earlier).
I also quite like it that there’s a danger of relegation in PES2008’s Master League. Looking around the forums, I’m not the only one suffering. (One of a relative few, admittedly, but still I’m not alone!)
I’m away from console right now and won’t get a chance to check Muntari’s curve until tonight or tomorrow morning, but from memory his curve is quite shallow and I think he may be at or past his peak right now in my ML.
Over the next day or two I’ll take some pics of my key players’ stats and development curves and post them up – probably on Monday. When I do, bear in mind that I’m about 6 games ahead of the blog, so their devleopment will be a few points ahead of where we are now.
Shaw develops into a player worth his weight in gold! But yes, very weak. Having Shaw and the equally weak Shimizu together in my midfield might account for a lot of my defensive woes.
It sounds like from the descriptions I’m reading that Body Balance and general physique has been given a bit more weight in the calculations that go into challenges and tackles.
In PES 5, speed was king. In PES 6 (IMO), it’s all about dribble speed and accuracy, and it sounds like 2008 is all about Balance.
Bradley was class in PES6. He played over his stats and got pretty good over time. He was just above-average enough to sign for a low-ranked team. Loved that player. He and Camacho inevitably anchored my midfield.
p.s. I really like that the Youth players are all potential but need a few seasons to develop before they are really ready for the big-time. In PES6, I’d slot youth players into my starting 11 with the ink still drying on their contracts.
It’s certainly giving me lots of food for thought. Previously I’ve been of the opinion that skill is all: get a player with good attacking or defending, and good shooting/speed/heading/stamina, and into the team they’d go, automatically. And I’d usually win more games than I lost. As can be seen, it’s not working out for me this year. And I’m slow to adapt to change. We all know what Evolution thinks about those who cannot/will not adapt… Gulp.
I have to say though, I’m kind of loving the struggle. As a few posters remarked in this thread over on PESfan – http://forums.pesfan.com/showthread.php?t=187551&highlight=relegation – what you want from a league is either a tense championship battle or a tense relegation battle.
I see you got Bradley. Great choice. I have him in my squad currently, and he’s brilliant, though he needs shooting training. I used to get Shaw to train body balance every off season to get him ready to play with the big boys, after a while he’d be amazing.
I’ve had to play Bradley a few times due to fitness issues and I have to say for a youngster he’s pretty strong – and he has that all-important Middle Shooting ability. I do the targeted training in the off-season too, although I’ve never thought to focus just on one stat. Thanks for the tip!
I always pick one ability, and get the player to practice it for the whole negotiation period. I thought everyone else did that? Players like Shaw, Anderson and Shimizu need to train body balance consistently for a few seasons before they’re usable. The same goes for some other players about speed, shooting, and all the rest. With defenders, I usually get them to train either heading or body balance, unless those stats are already good enough. I’ve been using this Konami player called Ribeiro for years, and I always get him to train headers for at least three seasons. He’s 199cm tall, and he already has good stats, but after target-training, he’s a target man like no other in the game. Just lob the ball, and wait for him to slot it home. He’s also great at shoulder other players out of the ball. If you lob a ball to him, and press R2, he’ll push the other players when the ball comes, and run by himself with it a lot of the time.