Coventry City 1-3 Sevilla
Posted by: not-Greg in defending, scripting, tags: defending, scriptingAhhh, the first game after the mid-season negotiations—always a chore, never a pleasure. Whether I’ve bought ten players or one player, or even no players at all (rare, but it happens), this fixture always seems to me to be among the toughest all season.
I only bought one player in those mid-season negotiations: Del Piero, a 17-year-old Regen. He’ll be a great player in the future but not now. Without any new blood out on the pitch, would I be spared the customary post-negotiations blues?
Nope. Sevilla were my opponents. One of the division’s top sides, they would’ve been hard to get to grips with anyway, but I didn’t help myself by conceding possession straight from the kick-off—my kick-off—after which they swept upfield, went past all my defenders as if they weren’t there, and scored.
I was 0-1 down in the 1st minute. Hmmm, I have to say. I seem to go 0-1 down at the start of games with an alarming frequency—usually when it’s the CPU’s kick-off, it has to be said. Conceding straightaway when it’s my kick-off is pretty rare and pretty unforgivable. I was duly ashamed.
I went chasing the game, flinging everyone and everything forward in an effort to get things back to 1-1 as soon as possible. In most cases when I go behind early I tell myself that I’ll be happy to get an equaliser by half-time, and then I play accordingly: with discipline and patience. It usually works out for me when I take this approach.
Sometimes, though, I just go crazy and decide that I have to pound the CPU team into the dirt, immediately.
I was 0-2 down at half-time using the devil-may-care approach. I was also down to 10 men—Donk, getting a rare start at the centre of defence thanks to International call-ups, made the long walk thanks to my rashness in the tackle. Even now I still thought I could come back.
I couldn’t. I was 0-3 down after ten minutes of the second half. I calmed down, started knocking the ball around with my ten men, waiting for openings. I’ve taken terrible defeats too often in PES whilst a man or two down to want it to happen again. I stopped Sevilla scoring, and got mysef a consolation—a nice mid-range shot from Nakamura. He doesn’t seem to score as many goals as I think he should. He’s in his mid-30s now and nowhere near being the player he was when I got him. He’s definitely on his way out at the end of the season.
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