PES Chronicles

I drew 0-0 in the opening game of season 2010. It was a respectable enough start. I was pleased with the clean sheet and the point. I had a man sent off in the game and felt I’d got away with it slightly.

But then I lost my second game to RC Strasbourg (yet another bogey team candidate). The score? 1-5. Oh dear…

The pattern for me and PES2008 on PSP/PS2 is becoming clear.

Either I concentrate and defend properly—standing off attackers, bringing across a second defender, executing perfect sliding challenges, shepherding the CPU away from danger areas—and thus keep a clean sheet, or I cave in after I concede just one goal, and go on to concede a hatful of goals.

It’s all to do with my current lack of patience that I mentioned a few days ago.

When I go 1-0 down in this last-gen version of the game, my next-gen version instincts kick in and I start to play as if this PSP/PS2 version is the same quasi-arcadey mess that the PS3/360 game was and is. (Sorry to all fans of next-gen PES2008. This is just my opinion, of course.)

I tear forward recklessly, losing the ball often and inviting the pressure that leads to the hatfuls of CPU goals.

I need to wake up and accept that I’m not playing the PS3 version any more. The PSP/PS2 version is a ‘proper’ PES game, i.e. there has to be some semblance of realistic football gameplay involved.

In the end it does all come down to that one word: patience. Before this year I had it in abundance for nigh on 7 years of continuous PES gaming. And then the so-called next generation came along and I unlearned all of my patience—the core of my PES nous, if you will. I need to relearn it again, in full, and fast.