Quite often in PES when you’re in a delicate position in the league, the performances of other teams around you will exactly mirror your own. If you win, they win; if you draw, they draw; if you lose, they lose. This is most noticeable when you’re top of the league by two points (for example) and then you lose and draw several key games—but somehow you remain top of the league by two points. Because, fortunately, the team(s) below you lost and drew those games as well…

It’s only because of this phenomenon that I’m still top of the league at the moment. The 5 games I’ve played since the mid-season negotiations have all gone poorly. Won 1, Drawn 1, Lost 3. I have no idea what I’m suddenly doing wrong.

I think the mid-season break simulates an interruption of momentum. In real life a team can be flying along and winning games for fun. One weekend there’ll be a break for International games, and when regular league play resumes that same all-conquering team suddenly finds itself barely able to string two passes together. Something like this effect, I think, is present in PES. Also the addition of new players (even just two new players) to a squad can dilute the team work equation.

Or (and this is probably the real reason) I’ve just got complacent on the back of my steady pre-mid-season form. That’s happened to me too often in PES for me to recount. A sudden drop-off of form when I unconsciously assume a foregone conclusion (the Title is mine!) has often left me trophyless at the end of the season. I must not let that happen this time.

I’ve played the first leg in the Quarter-Final of the WEFA Masters Cup—a nice bonus after being knocked out of the WEFA Championships. I’m taking the competition seriously, fielding my best players when possible. In truth this isn’t hard to do—my squad is pretty strong. There aren’t any real bench-warmers in it, apart from the still untested 17-year-old Shevchenko. His time will come.

Speaking of young players: Kim Cyun Hi seems to like the Masters Cup. He scored two goals in both legs of the Quarter Final (against Rangers), helping me on my way to a 6-1 aggregate victory. I’m sorely tempted to start playing Kim Cyun Hi from the start in as many games as possible. I took a look at his stats the other day, and had to go for a lie-down afterward. I’ve never seen anything like it. Most young players take seven seasons to get the kind of growth that Kim has shown in less than two seasons. At the moment I’m strongly reminded of Shimizu at his peak—albeit a Shimizu with actual strength. Kim Cyun Hi should outstrip Shimizu with ease. He’s already got several stats in the red and high yellow zones—at the age of 19. This kid is seriously going places.

I think I’ve got a good-enough squad to achieve anything I want to achieve in this Master League. I’ve got quality players from back to front. I don’t need to sign any more players, but it’s a very rare negotiations period in any season, in any Master League career, in any PES, when I don’t sign anyone. So I think I will sign some players.

The reasons for this are varied and complex. It’s not just a case of buying players for the sake of it. If I had to boil it down, if I had to nail the reason why I often buy players during a PES negotiations period when I manifestly don’t really need them, I’d say it’s just to have something to do during those weeks when there’s nothing else to do. It seems wasteful and wrong simply to press the button repeatedly to go to the next week and then reach the end of the whole period with nothing to show for it.

And anyway, my squad, although talented, isn’t as big as it could be. 25 players is more than adequate to conduct a possible Championship-winning campaign (fingers crossed), but I think to win a Treble and be comfortable whilst winning it (i.e. not picking fatigued players) a squad-size of about 30 is ideal. And I might as well set about preparing for next season right now. At least this way the players will have been with me and settling into the team for the rest of this season.

So I had a look round… and I didn’t really like the look of anything I saw. I checked the Youth list, as ever—always, always, always check the Youth list, every negotiations period. There’s usually gold just laying around waiting to be picked up. Yes, you have to wait a few seasons before the gold becomes, ah, golden, but the wait is worth it, and it can save you paying a hefty combined transfer fee and wage for that player further down the line. For me, PES Master League wouldn’t be half the game mode it is without Regens and the development of young players.

Shevchenko was sitting there in the Youth list, and I snapped him up. Like his real-life counterpart, PES Shevchenko can be either brilliant and unstoppable, or tame and anonymous. That’s how I found him to be in PES5, anyway, when I last had him—let’s see how he turns out in this one.

There was no one else I wanted in the Youth list. I had a quick search for a good strong centre-back. For some reason I have to rotate CBs from game to game much more frequently than I ever remember doing in the past. Maybe it’s my playing style, maybe it’s just the game this year. Whichever, I needed the cover.

I found a very useful-looking young CB with the unlikely name of Feli Forranz. Never heard of him. But he looks like he could handle playing the one-game-in-four that he’ll probably end up playing for me.

I didn’t get rid of any players. The two who came in added to my squad. All that’s left now is to complete this season and win the league. I think I’m going to do it.

Today, Friday April 25th 2008, is exactly halfway through the current PES year. If history is any guide, PES2009 will hit the shelves on the last Friday in October 2008—six calendar months away. I’m already feeling excited.

Back on December 3rd I posted ‘10 things I’d like to see in PES2009‘. At the time I didn’t have a clear appreciation of the near-total disaster that was next-gen PES2008. The excellent current-gen PES2008 was still a good way off in my future. Things have changed a lot for me and PES over the past few months. Thanks to next-gen PES2008 I’m disillusioned, jaded, more than a bit cynical. I was never like that before. Every PES was like the sweetest nectar from the gods. Or is that ambrosia?

The sheer travesty that was next-gen PES2008 (sorry, but it was) has paradoxically made anticipation of PES2009 all the keener. What will Konami come up with? Will they be able to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat, and amaze us all with the kind of game that we were all expecting last year? Or will it be yet another soulless corporate cash-grabbing operation?

Despite everything, I have high hopes. I don’t think PES2009 will be the ultimate football game on the new generation of high-powered consoles. It’s far too early in the cycle for that just yet. I think we’ll have to wait until PES2010, or even later, for stupendous excellence.

But I hope that PES2009 will be what PES2008 could and should have been: just a solid game of PES, with HD graphics. That’s all I ever wanted of PES2008. That’s all I ask now of PES2009. I’ll be more than happy to wait another year or two for the next evolution in PES gaming, if I can just have a PS3 version of the game that’s worth the effort right now.

So now, standing on this symbolic day, becalmed between two poles, it’s fitting to revisit my Top 10 list of a few months ago. What does PES2009 have to do to satisfy me? The following bullet points represent my personal opinions only.

• PES2009 has to work right out of the box. No penalty box slowdown. No 150MB downloaded patches. If I even have to change just one setting in my PS3 menu to make the game run better, it’ll be another FAIL.
• It can’t be the simplest thing in the world to score Maradona-style goals on Top Player difficulty with the likes of Gary Neville. For God’s sake.
• Camera panning. It is not natural to play football games with the camera scooting up and down the touchline, box-to-box. It is natural to play with the camera anchored on or near the halfway line. (I don’t hold out much hope for this one. For some reason football game developers have struggled with next-gen consoles much more than their FPS and action-adventure counterparts. Don’t ask me why. EA’s UEFA2008 still doesn’t feature anything like the camera options of the older FIFA games. I strongly suspect that we may have to wait at least another year before we see camera panning in next-gen PES.)
• Master League. Can we please go back to a small Division 2? And how about a Division 3? I know, I know. The fans wanted 20 teams in the lower division. But since when has anyone listened to the fans? What were they thinking?
• Online play has got to work flawlessly. Not a big deal for me, as I’m not much of an online gamer. The current era came along about a decade too late for me. By this stage of my life, gaming is solidly a single-player affair. I’m just not attracted by the whole deal with meeting people inside games and then playing against and even ‘chatting’ with them (*shudder*). But I’d like to have the option. I’d like to do it occasionally, when the mood takes me. And that hasn’t been possible this year. The ongoing disgrace of next-gen PES2008 online continues. For some reason, the good denizens of the internet have refrained from storming Konami HQ with flaming torches and pitchforks. It’s a real puzzle to me why Konami seems to have been given a pass on this. If anyone has any plausible theory why the Internet hasn’t collapsed under the weight of anger of the thousands of players who have to put up with lagging, teleporting, and various other online indignities that make the game literally unplayable most of the time, I’d love to hear it. Or have things changed? It’s been a while since I checked, to be fair.
• Strip selection: I must haz it. The ‘death of a thousand cuts’ that next-gen PES2008 gradually underwent in mine and in many others’ affections could be partly laid at the door of this little baby. The infuriating thing was that it was present in Exhibition modes and in online games. Its absence from all other modes seemed peculiarly spiteful. Even more galling was that neither of the two whopping game patches did anything about it. Curse you, Seabass.

Doubtless I’ll think of more after I’ve published this post—I’ll update the list as they occur to me, or are suggested. Actually, I’ve just come from playing a few games on last-gen PES2008, and there’s something that’s been bothering me about PES for several years:

• The little shuffle forward that the goalkeeper does when he’s carrying the ball: stop it. It wastes time. When I press the button, I want the goalkeeper to release the ball in the manner specified. Immediately. No little shuffle forward. No puzzling delay.

We’re not far from the time when we should start seeing screens and reading the first hands-on gameplay reports. July and August, I think, will see all of that information start to show up. PESfan will slow to a crawl and stay that way until a week after release. The demos will appear (or not appear) for the 360 and the PS3. (I won’t be fooled again this year: no PS3 demo=another disaster of a game=no purchase. This I swear.)

And then, in October, D-day.