It’s pre-season in my surprisingly tough Master League career in the surprisingly good PES2009 on PS3. A few weeks ago, after a sacking on FIFA09’s Manager Mode I picked up Konami’s creaking old game again, just to see how the old girl felt after a few weeks with EA’s loose-limbed young hussy. And I’m still here. It’s far too early yet to draw any final conclusions from this. My own tentative conclusion is that I seem to have two very playable and thoroughly enjoyable football games this year, and I don’t want the feeling to end.

My Master League struggles are unprecedented on any version of PES. This will be my 4th season in the bottom division. Over the past few seasons I’ve struggled to pay the salary. This time last season I was forced to cut my squad to just 23 players. I thought that was bad enough but now I’ve got a shortfall of 3300 points and it’s going to be tight. Very tight.

I scheduled 5 pre-season friendlies again. I was going to change the fixtures chosen for me and choose different, weaker teams, but in the end I left the fixtures well alone. I wanted to take on the bigger teams and hopefully snatch a victory or two. Even a few draws would help. The bigger the team, the more money you get for a win or draw.

Before playing my first match, against Feyenoord, I changed my kits again. This is something I do after nearly every ML season and always have done, really. I only took a break from doing it last year because PES2008 just wasn’t worth the effort. PES2009, however, is.

I went for a mostly-white home kit with Sky Blue trimmings and sleeves. The away kit is a kind of burgundy-red with Sky Blue trimmings. Whatever kit I go for I like to keep at least a hint of Sky Blue somewhere. Master League with its version of Coventry City is all taking place in my head anyway. But I like to keep some kind of connection, however tenuous, with the real football world.

I did a lot better than last year in my pre-season friendlies. A draw and a win brought in 1200 points. Perhaps this is a reflection that I’m slowly—very slowly—starting to get to grips with PES2009.

I put a whole host of players up for sale, hoping for a similar stroke of good fortune that saw the CPU actually buy one of them last year. This year, however, I had no offers and faced the last week of negotiations with a serious cash shortfall and a serious headache. You get a Game Over in Master League if you can’t pay your team’s wages at the end of the last week of negotiations.

I suppose it could have been worse. Thanks to that draw and win in the friendlies, I ‘only’ had to release 5 players. Among them was Schone, one of my signings in that first mid-season negotiations. That one hurt.

The upshot of all my releasing is that I’m left with a squad of just 17 players. Which is ridiculous. But it’s not as bad as it might appear. The Division 2 schedule is a pretty forgiving one. Matches are spread over many weeks, and there are lots of rest breaks. All I have to do is struggle through to the mid-season negotiations, and then I can pick up a few new players.

On the right is my complete, ridiculously small squad for the start of season 2011-2012. This is going to be hard work. I actually can’t wait to get started.

Last season I just about squeezed through negotiations with 30 salary points to spare. This season it was even tighter. The margin was 11 points. I can’t go on living dangerously like this. My plan for the coming season is simple: win some bloody matches…

It’s a weird game, this PES2009. Coming so hot on the heels of the biggest FAIL that the ISS/PES series has ever known, it started very much on the back foot. I was suspicious of it—and I still am suspicious of it now, in truth. But it is a good game. And it’s got depths that you might never discover if you do what I did and just react in abject horror to its ‘on-rails’ feel after the liquidity of FIFA09. But the truth is—or seems to be at the moment—that they’re both good games.

That’s my two penn’orth anyway. It’s already a familiar theme from me this year, and I hope to be repeating myself, in various forms, from now until September 2009, when the next big thing comes along.

Last night I had a few games on FIFA09. They were my first games on FIFA09 for about ten days. And I had a great time. It was on the Xbox360 (I’m still waiting for the PS3 patch). I only meant to have one quick game, just to see, but ended up playing two Exhibition games and two games in my Atletico Madrid MM career. I was amazed and enraptured all over again by just how good a football game FIFA09 is. But I was most surprised by being able to slip back into the FIFA09 style of gameplay so easily after all this time playing PES2009.

Several weeks ago when I first tried to switch from one game to the other, I was worried about ‘contamination’ in both directions. Trying to play PES2009 as if it’s FIFA09 and FIFA09 as if it’s PES2009 does both games a great disservice. But last night I barely tried to ‘PES it up’ at all. Later on I did, but that was when I was behind late on in a match, and getting frustrated. I think all of us who ‘grew up’ on ISS/PES will never be able to stop ‘PESing about’ to some degree for the rest of our natural lives, in any football game. (We’ll probably still try to play Space Soccer 2023, or whatever, with our fingers firmly gripping R1…)

FIFA09 is a sublime game. I’m really looking forward to playing it regularly again on my PS3 when the patch comes. And it looks now as if I will be able to play FIFA and PES, together, this year. That initial period of strangeness when it felt impossible for me to play both games might be over.

In a very peculiar and unexpected way, this year might be one of the best possible years to be a football gamer. How strange is that? The win-win thing, finally. It’s still early days yet (I’m thinking about January again) but how strange, and how great, would that be?

——————-

Season 2010-2011 in my PES2009 Master League has come to an inglorious end. After picking up those few extra players in the mid-season negotations, I won a couple of games and things looked rosy. But I haven’t won a game since. The season dribbled to a close with a couple of feeble draws and a final shattering run of six consecutive defeats.

And so I’ll spend another season at least in Division 2. Maybe in the dim and distant ML past I’ve had worse starts to a career, but if I did I don’t remember them. I think this is the worst I’ve ever done. For that reason alone, PES2009 is already a remarkable game.

The one crumb of comfort I can take from this new failure of a season is that my youngsters are starting to blossom. Jackson is turning into a reliable player at CB. His current development isn’t that great, but it’s still coming along nicely. Another season or two and he’ll be a proper defensive giant.

And then there’s Dietrich. A young superstar-in-waiting DMF, he’s just about to start bossing midfields in the manner of great PES DMFs of the past (Mathieu & Bradley & Prieto & co.). I’m expecting great things from him in the future (a few goals would be particularly nice). Here’s a fairly gratuitous picture of Dietrich, appropriately bathed in a celestial glow:

And now here’s this season’s final league table. Yes, it was another bad season, but who’s that team in bottom place?

It’s not COVENTRY CITY in 12th place, that’s for sure. At least I’m off the bottom and things are moving in the right direction. The only way is up…

Not a single win in the first half of my 3rd season in Master League on PES2009. This is not good. This isn’t how things are meant to be. You’re meant to gradually improve, season on season, in Master League. But it seems I’m not getting better—I’m getting worse.

In the last league game before the mid-season negotiations, my opponents were Aston Villa. They got relegated from Division 1 last season. As Nelson Muntz might say: ha-ha… In real life, ’the Villa’ are Coventry City’s traditional derby rivals. FIFA09 seems to think our rivals should be Birmingham City—but no, that’s just plain wrong.

I was pumped up for the game against Villa, despite it all being in my mind. I beat them 1-0 with a late goal. My first win of the season, and what a fixture to get it in.

The final game before mid-season was the first leg of the quarter final of the Divsion 2 Cup. My opponents? Aston Villa, of course. I lost badly, 0-3, at home. The second leg will be just a formality for them.

And so to the all-too-short mid-season negotiations. I was in a poor situation money-wise, but decided to take a risk. I picked up another 3 players from the Youth list.

GAMBINO is an amazingly good SB/SMF. I’ll play him as an AMF, or even as a CF if need be.

CONWEY is just an average-rated, promising-looking CB.

And it was about time, I thought, that I picked up a good young goalkeeper for the future. I had my pick of several decent-looking GKs in the Youth list. The magic of a well-known name swung me towards DUDEK.

All three are 17 years old and will cost me another 1300 salary points at season’s end. This is living very dangerously, but it’s a calculated risk. I’m banking on these acquisitions—GAMBINO in particular—enabling me to pick up  wins and draws that I otherwise wouldn’t have, thus earning extra money, and thus negating any possibility of salary trouble.

And, as a bonus, I also managed to send out two players on loan. LOTHAR and GUTIERREZ went to CPU clubs for a combined fee of 950 points. That relieves the pressure a bit.

I lost my first game after the negotiations period, anti-climactically. It’s always disappointing to lose this one, with all players fit and in form.

But I won the next two games. I played GAMBINO as a striker in the second game and won it 3-1.

Using CAPITAL LETTERS for player names, as PES2009 insists on doing, is contagious. It does make them STAND OUT. I’ll use the convention myself from now on.

PES2009 is destined to frighten me every time I score a few goals in a game, or have what I regard as an easier time of it. I’ll always wonder if it’s about to show its true PES2008-themed colours. After this couple of wins, I’m no longer as worried about paying my end-of-season bills (it’ll still be tight, but I should make it). I’m now more worried about PES2009’s mask slipping, and the ghost of PES2008 coming back to haunt me.