Something has come up at the time of writing, so a very short post. I’ll be active in comments later on today and over the weekend as normal.

I’ve forged a path to the top of the table – still proudly unbeaten:

It’s interesting seeing Hull and Leicester up there with me. After real-life Leicester’s heroics last season, I’d imagine the game designers wanted to include the possibility of a lesser team having a golden season in PES2017. It’s a simple enough thing to do with a line of code. Just insert a script that says something like ‘let there be a 5% chance that this season a lesser team will play like a top team’, and covertly bump that team’s players’ stats up accordingly.

There’s already so much scripting in any PES match that one more layer isn’t going to make much difference. And it would produce tables like the one above. And just look at Leicester’s goal-scoring.

I also made it through my  Champions League group after 4 straight wins. Still got two matches to play, but they’re dead rubbers.

This qualification, of course, means that I miss my last chance to try for the Europa League in PES2017.

And finally today (yes I said it’d be a short post), here are two goals.

The first is from Ibrahimovic, a lovely ‘reverse hook’ type of goal from the edge of the area into the opposite side of the net – one of my favourite types of football gaming goal. Long-time readers with exceptional memories may recall me loving these in one of the early PS3 FIFA games – FIFA09 I think.

The second goal is from my left-back – a cracking, crunching, thumping, screaming 25-yard volley from a cleared corner that threads the eyes of several needles on its way into the corner of the net.

These are also one of my favourite types of football game goals, but passingly rare in all editions. It secured me an unlikely draw against a stubborn Arsenal, and kept my still-unbeaten record intact.

Rodrigo Palacio is my player of PES2017. That’s him in action above, about to belt in yet another PES2017 long-ranger. And not one of the first-timer hits, no. A proper ‘running’ one with multiple touches before the decisive strike.

Replay here.

I’ve scored quite a few PES2017 long-rangers now, probably as many as I scored in PES2014 in the end.

This one is one of my favourites. Feeling this go in off the post was a great PES moment, and one of my highlights of PES2017.

As much as any player can stand out in this online-oriented, individuality-lite era, Palacio does it.

I racked up another win in the Champions League group — I am going to qualify there.

In the league I thoroughly enjoyed thumping Chelsea 5-0. It was a much-needed goalscoring jolt in the arm after experiencing a few dour, near-goalless sessions in a row.

As ever, I cannot tell what, if anything, I did differently in this game that made it a festival of goals. My dominant experience of PES2017 over the last few weeks has been one of battering myself against the most stubborn AI catennacio defences, one after the other. Saying ‘Norwich at home’ is linguistically almost the same as saying ‘nil-nil’.

This was a great session on PES2017, one of the best I’ve had. The kind of session that whispers ‘play a Season 11‘. Well, if they’re all like this one, I might, but they won’t be so I won’t.

But I thumped Chelsea 5-0. There are two stats here that stand out and provide talking points:

First of all, for Chelsea to have had just a single off-target shot is a disgrace. That should never happen on Superstar. I don’t recall playing an immense defensive game. Maybe I did.

Secondly – look at the fouls count. Still not many, but by PES2017 standards this match was downing in fouls.

Lots of fouls in a match makes for good football gaming. Far from impeding gameplay, fouls enhance gameplay in the same way that full stops enhance written language. Without them, things would just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and you get the idea.

I’ve been banging on about lack of fouls in PES2017 from the start. I’ve banged on about it all year, and last year too. You can be certain that I will be banging on about lack of fouls in PES2017 right until the end. It’s how I roll. I don’t stop banging on about something so banging-on-worthy, just because I believe some readers might have grown tired of me banging on about it. No I bloody well won’t ‘move on’.

Well, not until I move on to PES5 for the remainder of this football game year. Which is when I’ll start talking about the fouls issue again, but viewed from another angle. Brace yourselves.

(Example paragraph from about two months hence: Is it a coincidence that the greatest football game ever made is famous/notorious for having ‘too many’ fouls in it? Does PES5 not demonstrate that plentiful fouls, far from impeding the player’s experience of the gameplay in a football game, actually enhances it? Aaaand so on.)

Back in the sometimes-great PES2017, here’s the current league table. Still unbeaten. That goal difference needs to go up, up, up.

Season 10 has had the most tepid opening of any season I can remember. Signing Buffon was probably the highlight.

Matches are fast and furious, fouls are few and far between, and goals also seem to be at a premium.

If it wasn’t for the still-plentiful headers from crosses and corners, I’d only have scored a couple of goals all season.

I’ll never, ever stop going on about fouls in PES nowadays.

I’m continuously astounded, at the end of a 10-minute match with zero fouls in it, that this kind of thing is allowed. Konami would say to me in return: ‘So how come you’re starting your 10th season of Master League? Hey? Hey?‘ To which I would just have to comically splutter.

After my transfer window wheeler-dealering I was left with this Treble-challenging squad of 26:

(Image altered to show the three players that wouldn’t fit onto a single 23-man screenshot.)

Quite a few Youths in there.They’re here to play when my real players are knackered. Getting Youths in the final season is mostly pointless. This is definitely the final season.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to come up with a nickname for C BACCA, but it just won’t come. I’m all out of ideas.

I’ve got off to a good start in the Champions League:

Played two, won two. I believe I will qualify for the knockouts in the Champions League for the first time in PES2017.

3 of my 4 goals so far have been, you guessed it, headers from crosses. The headers where you press Shoot almost as soon as the crosser has kicked the ball, when the ball is still 30+ yards away from the would-be header. I still cannot get over the fact that this mechanic is an actual thing. Why hasn’t it been patched out of the game?

In the league it’s another unbeaten start, but again those stubborn draws are mounting up – and look at my pitiful 4 goals in 5:

Season 10, let’s get it done.

Isn’t it nice to be finishing PES2017 as March finishes? That’s a heck of a good run for any PES. Fouls or no-fouls.

Season 9 is over. I won the League at a relative canter in the end.We finished joint-second-highest goalscorers. Largely thanks to the midseason-discovery of the ‘trick’ to scoring headed goals from crosses and corners: press shoot while the ball is still miles away from the player. Who knew?

All’s fair in love and PES, and the trick helped my new striker, Aduriz, to 4th spot in the final top scorers’ chart. Around 12 of his 19 goals were headers.

I won the title with a match to spare. I don’t have any footage of the post-game celebrations. Not even a screenshot. I pressed Start at the same moment in which I noticed my players were jumping around, and thus skipped everything. Not that there’s much to see when you win a title in the Premier League.

My other target for this season was the Europa League. In all my time on Master League down the years, I’ve rarely won the UEFA Cup-equivalent competition, whatever name it’s gone under.

This season was almost certainly my last chance to win it. And what a chance — I swashbuckled my way to the final, playing some excellent matches against top-notch European opposition. And then the final was against Chelsea.

I groaned when I saw it’d be Chelsea. There are some matches in this Master League of mine that have never been great. Barely even good, most of the time. I’m talking about the fast, furious, fouls-free, flowing, ‘fun’ sorts of matches. You know, matches with the frenzied feel of online multiplayer transposed to the single-player arena. Abominations, all of them.

The Rivals matches were always the worst culprits for this. Somebody at Konami evidently thinks there should be fewer fouls, or even no fouls at all, in football derbies. Tsk, tsk. I hated Rivals matches so much that I removed all my club’s Rivalries in Edit mode.

But a great deal of regular matches against top domestic sides are like that too. Chelsea and Man City are the worst offenders. Man Utd and Liverpool next. Even Tottenham. I’ve had the odd good match against these sides, but more bad than good.

The Europa League final against Chelsea was a bad match. 0-0 it ended after 90 minutes. 0-0 after 120 minutes. The fouls count, after 120 minutes of high octane action, was 1-1. Disgraceful.

I lost the penalty shootout. I think I saved one, but I missed a couple.

At least the penalty shootout was enjoyable. PES’s new-style penalty system since PES2014 is the best we’ve ever seen in PES, arguably in any football game. The perfect mix of stats-based skill and luck, as it should be. What a shame a cup competition penalty shootout is the only time we really ever get to use it in PES2017’s Master League.

Jarvis retired. I picked him for the final league match of the season. He scored a neat goal that turned out to be the winner (it’s in the video below). I brought him off in the last few minutes. He took the crowd’s applause.

Along came the Old Boys match, which I haven’t played since the first few seasons, on account of it being usually rubbish. To my surprise Jarvis was the player whose testimonial it was.

I picked him in this too, and chose to play the match. It was another poor quality game. Messi was on the opposing team but I didn’t notice him once. That shouldn’t happen.

Here are a couple of highlights from the end of the season. Jarvis’s farewell goal and testimonial celebrations are in, and so is a decent long-ranger laces goal from Aduriz.

Onto Season 10, almost certainly the last on PES2017 for me. How about a triple-header Treble?