Coventry City 9, Sunderland 0
Well, this is one way to put your bogey team in their place.
Nine goals in one game isn’t unprecedented for me in PES. I managed it once or twice in previous years. I remember one game in PES5 that I won 9-1. I had Veron in my team back then and he scored four of the goals. But…
In regards to PES2008, for the past several weeks I’ve had a certain sinking feeling lurking at the back of my mind and in the pit of my stomach.
While I was still getting to grips with the game I read forum posts on PESfan and elsewhere saying that the game was too easy and it was routine to get 5+ goals in every game. I never took much notice. I’m just an average player, I thought. I’ll be all right.
If this turns out to be the norm – if I discover that scorelines of 4-1, 5-2, 6-3, 9-0 etc. are commonplace for me in PES2008 – then the game might as well be dead to me. The only way I could continue playing Master League would be to handicap myself with some pretty restrictive house rules. I’ve kind of done this before, back in PES4. I also found that game relatively easy for a PES title.
But all of this is somewhat jumping the gun. I’ve had one 9-0 result. One swallow does not a summer make, and so forth. At this relatively early stage the jury is still out, but it’s walking toward the jury room door and Henry Fonda has nothing to say…
Back at that Sunderland game, Schwarz scored six of my 9 goals. Here’s his sixth goal, set up by a nice back-heel from Andy Cole:
In two other league games from this period I beat Arsenal 2-1 and Helsingborg 5-2. I all but sleepwalked through the latter match. Hmmm.
It’s frustrating not to have hit top spot again yet. Manchester United simply refuse to lose. As soon as they do, with my formidable goal difference, I’ll be there.
Man Yoo, myself, and Arsenal are slightly pulling away from the rest. I’d prefer a two-horse race to the title. It’s more clear-cut. It’d leave me some spare attention to concentrate on the Cups. Speaking of which…
The final match in the pre-tournament ECC qualifying group ended PSV 0, Coventry City 1.
It was a tight, tense game. I knew a draw would see me through, but a defeat would be disastrous, and while it was 0-0 I was always in danger.
It stayed 0-0 until the 80th minute. Every time PSV attacked I thought: this is it, PES2008 is about to mug me. But I held firm. Mattsson soothed my nerves in the 80th minute with a firm headed goal from a corner. I finished top of the group in the end. I would have qualified in second place on goal difference even if I had lost the PSV game.
The Treble is still alive. I did my level best to sabotage the campaign before it had properly started. I have dug myself out of a giant hole that was all of my own making. Never again. I’ve got a very welcome run of just one league game per week for a couple of weeks, and then I’ll start playing in a new group in the ECC competition proper, and the next round of the D1 Cup will also get underway. I plan to take great care.
My performances in the Cups so far have been eccentric to say the least. I played the first three games of the ECC thinking I had won just by turning up. I wasn’t just flirting with disaster – I was French-kissing it whilst stroking its thighs. Never again.
(p.s. I have to work over the weekend so we’re back to one post per day until Monday – then it’ll be two/three posts per day through to the big finish!)
nice to know you survived the group stages. do you feel your team is capable of getting the treble or will you bring in some new faces during the midseason period?
9-0 eh, nice work. It does, unfortunately, become routine to score at least 5 a game, as you have realised. when you have the top players, the CPU is never a match, not even on the hardest difficulty settings.
P.s. have you noticed that players practically never get injured, and if they do, its for 1 week? not very realistic.. theres normally 3-5 ppl in a squad injured
david – If I don’t win the Treble with this team and squad, it’ll be because I got complacent like I did in the first group games of the ECC. I really feel I should win every game, and not just by one or two goals. I’ve never, ever felt like this before in PES, and I don’t like it
I’ve noticed the lack of injuries. It’s just another thing to add to the long list of things they left out in the rush to get the game released. Have you noticed another missing feature this year – when you commit a bookable foul but the referee plays advantage, you no longer get the booking once play eventually stops. A great shame, as they had that feature really nailed in the last two games. It was perfect.
In pes 6 i stopped playing one master league after beating Real Madrid 11-1… Worst thing is that it was in the maximum levels of difficulty for every possible parameter… So i completely understand you.
Nice reading you. Good luck
Hector – I never found PES6 all that easy. Only after I got a team of Galacticos in my ML did I ever feel confident going into every game, and even then I never had anything more than a 4-0, and only very rarely. 11-1 is a stupendous scoreline! How are you finding PES2008? I shudder to think what scorelines you might be getting.
Congrats on qualifying to the second round of the ECC. And in first place, no less.
With regards to the high scorelines, I’m staring to get them too. After beating Bayern 7-2 on the ECC final (ok, they were down to 10 men, and their striker had to be played on goal, but still…), I’ve won 7 straight games in my league this season, and a couple had 5-0 scorelines. I’m already 7 points clear of the second place, and the cups haven’t even started yet.
I guess I’ll follow your lead, and go back to PES5. Especially since I have an OF for it with all the Brazilian 1st Division.
Ive been playing my first ML, and jeez i’m owning lol.
80goals in the league alone and im just about to go into mid-season negotiations. haha. 150 goals for the whole season should be easily accomplished!
Im gonna get the treble then work solely on my new ML.
Mirandinha – it’ll be a while before I get to PES5, as I have unfinished business with PES2008 that’s going to take me a brand-new ML to complete (see tomorrow’s post for the exact reason why – and it’s not what you might think…).
I’ve blown the dust off PES5 over the past few days to make sure it works with my PS3, and it works fine. It did crash the console the first time I tried it, so it might be a problem. This is why I kept my trusty old PS2, so one way or the other, sooner or later, there’ll be a PES5 ML or two talked about on here. I might even go the whole hog and play ALL of the PESes for a week or two in turn. (I still have them all, with the exception of PES4 which I traded in at the time for PES5 – I was unemployed that year.) There’s also the big FIFA08 week that I’ve been promising/threatening to do, and that will definitely go ahead too. I’ve been messing with FIFA08 over the past few days, just to see if I could *really* play a FIFA game after a PES has been released – and again I think I can. There’s loads of quality in FIFA08 that its faults just cannot spoil. So, all in all, there’s lots to get through even with the disappointment of PES2008. More than enough to take us to PES2009, anyway
I played a couple of Exhibition games on PES5 just to see if I could go back to it, and I think I can. The graphics look absolutely fine (PS3 upscaling helps), and the gameplay is IMO the best PES has ever been. Only PES3 comes close. The Exhibition games finished 0-0, 1-0, and 2-0. I was playing on default difficulty, England vs Scotland.
Aren’t the high scorelines in PES2008 just *so* disappointing!
david – 80 goals eh? Watch out for how my goals scored total starts going up and up. I’m now only 1 day ahead of the blog, and close to mid-season myself – and I’m well on course to get 100+ goals, and probably a lot more.
Who would ever have thought that PES would ever come to seem – what’s the word – *routine*?
I just lost 2 – 1 (second loss of the season), first game back after the negotiations!! i had the best team available with new signing ROONEY in the AMF position, game set on 5mins only, and i let in 2 very weak goals (against anderlecht), and didnt manage to score more than 1… W-E-I-R-D.
5min games produce more realistic scorelines btw, but it isnt as fun. Its more frantic and ‘get to the result’ rather than ‘i like playing pro’.
rooney sucked balls (his first appearance may explain his lack of trapping the ball after a pass to him).
the treble is SO on. my squad is filled to the rim with talent.
I barely ever watch celebrations, but have you noticed how the players dont smill after they score? like, never?
I am very much on the edge of booting up PES6 again. I would like to go back to PES5 however i don’t have an option file for it and with the PS3 it’s not possible to use a max drive to get one on.
I also have a long running ML on PES6 that i would like to continue.
You point out about the advantage rule over ruling the bookable offence.
That was some what of a bug in PES 6 as well, happened quite alot to me actually (me getting away with it mostly – i had it done to perfection)
Never noticed it in PES6, but it may have been an occasional glitch that I had the good fortune never to run into. In PES2008 it’s the norm: commit a bookable foul, or have one committed against you, and the ref plays advantage, you won’t see any yellow cards. For some reason the arrival of the next-gen consoles has made the big games companies completely lose their collective marbles. EA are not innocent: in FIFA08, goalkeepers cannot be sent off. Oh, and manager mode matches are all played in daylight. Was it like this back at the turn of the century when the last gen consoles were appearing? I don’t think it was. Strange, and frustrating.