All season in one day Comments Off
Here’s something I’ve never done before. I’m going to dispose of most of a season in one post. The Division 2 season on the PSP/PS2 version is so short that I played through most of the season 2010 games all in one night. It wasn’t pretty.
I’m resorting to this because the rest of season 2010 after week 4 was just like season 2009: short and brutal. I played another 10 games and won just 1 of them. I drew 3. And I lost 6. Which gave me a not-so-grand end-of-season record that looked like this:
Played: 14. Won: 2. Drew: 3. Lost:9. Goals Scored: 10. Goals Against: 27
Final Position: 8th (resoundingly bottom of the table)
My disciplinary record was pretty poor as well. A dozen or so yellows and about seven reds. I continued my tradition—that I’ve apparently brought over from next-gen PES2008—of allowing one red card in a match to lead to several more in the same match. On the PS3 version I had loads of games completely abandoned because of this bad habit. I never had one of these PSP/PS2 games abandoned, but I came close.
My most common scoreline in all of the defeats was 0-2, for some reason. This actually gives me some grounds to hope. I was conceding 3 or 4 goals per game in past seasons. Things are moving in the right direction (at a glacier-like pace, admittedly).
The Division 2 Cup might as well not have happened. I got the feeling that I was amusing the CPU team just by turning up.
I made no transfers in the mid-season negotiations—nobody in, nobody out. I spent the restof the season alternately losing, and cursing, and scoring occasional goals, and acquiring vain and utterly unrealistic hopes of ’snatching promotion’ (as I bizarrely kept telling myself even when it was mathematically impossible).
My players frustrated me by playing well enough for me to see how good they are and how great I should be playing with them—but still badly enough to let goals in at one end and singularly fail to score them at the other. I discovered that Camacho is perhaps more effective as a DMF than as an AMF; that Komol is worthy of a permanent spot in the First XI; and Maldini is seriously taking his time to mature and stop being such a slow, clumsy prima donna. Tsk.
And this brings us bang up to date.
In week 1 of Negotations before season 2011 I have a huge problem. During season 2010 I only amassed 5000 points, and my salary bill is currently 9000 points.
Something’s got to give.
On Monday I’ll be speaking in full about this very intriguing pre-season 2011 Negotiation period. I’ll say this much now: season 2011 will be the most challenging season I have ever faced in any Master League in all my long years of playing this game.