Season 2017 got underway with a high-scoring game against FC Basel. My newly-positioned central stiker, Kim Cyun Hi, scored 4 goals in a sensational performance. He had a hat trick by half time, and then knocked in his fourth goal partway through the second half. The final score was 6-2.

I’ve almost given up trying to keep clean sheets. It seems to me that PES2008, more than any other ‘classic’ PES, simply isn’t very ‘clean-sheet-friendly’. Or, again, is it me? I’ve made a big deal out of my averageness at the game—is being relatively poor in defence just another aspect of being average? I always think that I should be better at defence after spending many seasons on PES5 conceding less than 10 goals. If I made up my mind not to concede a goal, I usually could do it. It doesn’t seem to work in PES2008.

My other two goals against Basel came from my other two strikers. Giggs out on the left bagged himself one, and Del Piero on the right—playing instead of an unfit Andy Cole—also contributed with a fine drive from an acute angle. It’s always good when all of your strikers get on the scoresheet. I like to imagine that it improves their collective morale and sharpens them up for the next game, although this is probably wishful thinking.

Del Piero, incidentally, is one of my squad’s unsung heroes. I’ve had him as a Regen for a few seasons now and his stats have suddenly shot up. I most often play him as an AMF in place of Camacho or Dos Santos when required. For some reason I always think of Del Piero solely as a midfielder, despite him being extremely handy as a CF.

I’ll try to focus upon Del Piero—and my other unsung heroes—in due course. For now, I look at Del Piero in particular and wonder if I should pick him instead of Dos Santos. Del Piero, although right-footed, has those two magic words—both sides—that enable him to play over on the ‘wrong’ side of the pitch. However, I like to match players’ footedness with their positions. I just think a left-sided role demands a left-footed player. Eveything seems to work better that way—at least in my mind, which is arguably where any team has to work first if it’s to work at all.

Maybe I should have got a left-footed AMF in the pre-season. I spent the negotiation period not getting any new players. I did want a couple of new players, and tried for some top targets (Shaw, Bos, Khumalo) but they wouldn’t come to me after two attempts each and I just gave up.

My squad, although brilliant (if I may say so myself), felt a little stale at times last season. Yes, I won the Treble, but in the League it was more a case of the top CPU team, Valencia, mysteriously throwing it away. I lost or drew too many games, I finished the season top of the league on goal difference, with a win average of just 60% and an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

I’m definitely suffering from PES fatigue. I suffer from it at some point every PES year. I’m only human, and familiarity breeds contempt, and worse things happen at sea, and so on and so forth… This year has been my worst year for PES fatigue—for several reasons. For one thing there’s the startling emergence of FIFA and its beguiling new style of football gaming. There’s also the fact of so many other great games on the next-gen consoles all clamouring for my attention. I still haven’t played my copy of Mass Effect, and I know I want to.

But the main reason is that I’ve probably played the PSP version of PES2008 just a bit too much. At times over the past few months, PES on the PSP has been the last thing I’ve done before going to sleep and the first thing I’ve done after waking up—for weeks at a time. There’s only so much of that kind of thing that any game could withstand. PES is only human too.

Season 2016 was a good one. I won the Treble—League, Cup, European Cup—but it left me unsatisfied for a lot of reasons.

Number one was that I felt I shouldn’t have won the Treble. I messed up the start of the league season and should never have been able to overtake the CPU team at the top. When PES indulges in macro-scripting, it’s often not very subtle about it.

What does it all mean for season 2017 and beyond? It means that I now want to win a proper Treble. I want to win it in style. I want to dominate in the league and win it comfortably. I’d like one of my players to take the Golden Boot (my early money’s on Andy Cole to do that). I also want to move my team up to #1 in the overall club rankings. I can’t believe Barcelona are at #1. They’ve done nothing of note in this Master League. Nothing.

After several negotiations periods where I didn’t get any new players, I felt that I should at least have a look for some. My squad is great—some of my players are at the very top of their game and could be described as brilliant—but overall things feel a little stale. Also, I do have some lightweights. A couple of my players never seem to get a game and remain underused and underdeveloped. Larsson in particular—a great PES striker—has suffered from lack of use. On the odd occasions throughout the seasons when international callups, injuries, and fatigue have forced me to use him, I’ve found him to be a player of low ability compared to the rest of my team. It shows, sometimes painfully.

I’d like to offload Larsson, and by this stage Donk, for some replacements with considerably better stats. Money is certainly no object. Even after my mammoth wages bill is taken into account, I’ve got a staggering 150,000+ points to play with, as the blurry picture shows. Could I get it up to 1,000,000 before PES2009 comes out? I think I could. (But would it go up to 1,000,000? I don’t think there’s room for another digit there.)

I called up the list of All Players, and sorted according to the Attack stat. I was pleased to note that I already had most of the top-rated players in my squad. Shaw was the top-rated according to Attack. I’d never managed to get him despite many years of trying. He’s 25 now, and still just young enough for it to be worth getting him. If I leave it any longer he’ll be in decline.

I forget which club he was at. It wasn’t one of the big ones—it was somebody like Parma. Whoever it was, I offered them 40,000 points plus Larsson. I offered Shaw himself a salary of 3000 points, eight hundred more than my next-best-paid player, Schwarz. I thought I was bound to get Shaw. I’d just won the Treble. My club ranking was second only to Barcelona. There was no reason why he wouldn’t come, surely?

He wouldn’t come. Or his club wouldn’t deal. I don’t know which it was. (Another innovation I’d love to see in PES2009: detailed reasons why transfer bids break down.) What should I amend for my next offer? The points offered, the player offered, the salary offered, what? There was no way of knowing for sure.

So I played safe and bumped up the points on offer to the maximum possible. 59,999. I don’t know why you can’t offer any more points than that. 59,999 seems a pretty arbitrary figure to me. If it’s limited to five digits, why not 99,999? Anyway, I offered Larsson in part exchange again, and this time I offered Shaw 3500 salary points. And once again it was all refused.

I gave up at that point. I was also trying for a couple of other players as well. The excellent Bos would have been a welcome addition to my defence, but he turned his nose up at all offers. Khumalo wouldn’t come for any money. Nobody wanted to come to me. I don’t know what it was, and I didn’t care to find out. I skipped all the remaining negotiations weeks. To hell with them. I’ve got a great squad anyway. Larsson can still be built up into a great player. I played my one pre-season friendly, against Rangers (a 1-1 draw), and moved onto the season proper.

On the First XI front, it’s time for Andy Cole to become an automatic first choice. He’s just too good. He’s not just a handy goal-poacher, as he was in real-life (when he was in the right mood). He’s also fast, skilful, and unerringly just there, in the right place, at the right time, to get crucial goals. I think he could win the Golden Boot in this coming season. We shall see.

Kim Cyun Hi moves to his natural position of central striker. There’s a sense in which Kim Cyun Hi is on trial for me this season. He came highly recommended, but so far I’ve only seen flashes. He is still very young, and probably has yet to fully mature. When he’s been great for me, he’s been great for me down the middle, and he’ll get a full season to prove his worth.

Dropping Schwarz to the bench for the sake of Kim Cyun Hi might seem a bit foolhardy, but it’s a bit of a no-brainer for me. As good as Schwarz is (and he’s very good), I just never seem to get the best out of him. He scores a lot fewer goals than I think he should. And I can see that Kim Cyun Hi, if used correctly, is a striker more in keeping with my pass-and-move style of play.

Otherwise I’m making no changes to the First XI. It’s largely a cosmetic selection anyway, as ever. Very few games will see this exact team take to the field. Over on the left of midfield, I did look long and hard at Dos Santos. He’s 28 now and his best years are almost behind him. However, I don’t have any other dedicated left-footed AMFs in my squad (something to shop for in the mid-season), so he keeps his place for now.

I needed to win my last two games of season 2016 to be in with a chance of taking the league title and securing my first Treble in PES2008. I’d already won the two Cups—domestic and European—and I’d steadily caught up with the runaway league leaders, Valencia. Before the season’s final fixture I was in second place, 2 points behind and with a superior goal difference.

I wasn’t too happy about the fact that I’d been able to catch them up. I’d prefer a much more realistic Master League where teams who streak into ten-point leads at the top of the table rarely—if ever—lose them. In PES it happens more often than not that there’s still everything to play for in the last game or two. Shaping an exciting league table is PES’s manifest objective throughout the course of a season, and it really shows.

Or is it just me? I’ve said many times that I’m a PES player of decidedly average ability. It happens to be true. Do other Master League players of greater ability win the league every season by a dozen or more points? I think there must be players like this out there. It’s probably my average skills that make every season, with machine-like inevitability, tend towards the ‘tense last-game thriller’ scenario. So I believe, anyway. Without a comprehensive scientific study, complete with control groups and white coats, it’s impossible to be certain.

I was 1-0 up at half time in my last game. At half time I checked the Valencia score—they were drawing 2-2 with their opponents. As things stood, Coventry City were the champions. I’d felt all along that Valencia would draw their game, that I’d just have to win mine to take the title. It was looking like coming true.

But how did I feel about this? Didn’t it all make me feel a little bit hollow? I was about to win the league, but five games ago I was nowhere. In the real world, a hollow victory would be better than no victory—but PES is greater than the real world, or it should be. I hold it to higher standards. I hold it to the standards of realism that I wish it possessed. (I’d love a Football Manager/PES hybrid. I’d just love it.)

Did I want to win the title, and the Treble, in this way? I wasn’t sure that I did. I even considered deliberately conceding a goal in the second half of my match and thus tossing away the title. Then I could go for a ‘proper’ Treble next season, one that didn’t rely on the CPU arranging for its best team to collapse. Seriously, I considered it.

But I didn’t consider it for long. PES is a game, after all. No matter how hollow it makes me feel at times, a game is all it is. If its programmers want to arrange things in a way that they believe will keep their customers interested in their product for longer, that’s entirely their prerogative. I don’t have to play it. I can swan off to FIFA any time I like.

So I decided to take the title, and the Treble, and just be glad of it. I held on in my game for the 1-0 win. It was tough towards the end as the CPU team stepped up its game to get an equaliser. For the entire last ten minutes I couldn’t get the ball. Every time I got it, I auto-lost it as the CPU players swarmed me. But I held on.

The moment the final whistle went I wondered what had happened in the Valencia game. What if they’d scored a cheeky winner to confound all my pseudo-moralistic claptrap? But no, of course they hadn’t. The title was mine. My players celebrated and then Prieto—DMF and captain for the day in place of the fatigued Bradley—collected the trophy:

So that, as they say, is that. The Treble is mine.

I don’t consider it a proper Treble, one that I’ve won. The CPU blatantly threw away the league title. I don’t ever remember finishing top of any table in PES before with a win average of just 60%. So in many ways I’ve still got a ‘proper’ Treble to go for, one that I win—in the league, anyway—rather than have gifted to me. I want to go to the top of the league and stay there and win by several points with a few games to spare. That’s my next target.

Season 2017 isn’t going to be about a post-Treble hangover. There’ll be no sense of “well, that’s this Master League ‘completed’.” I never ‘complete’ a Master League. It’s not the kind of game mode that can be completed. It just goes on, forever, until the end of time. Or until PES2009, whichever comes first.