Almeria are back in Division 1 of my Master League. I have to be careful when talking about them, as I tend to confuse them with Heracles Almelo, and swap their names around (i.e., ‘Heracles Almeria’, etc.). As much as I’m looking forward to this year’s brace of football games, beginning with FIFA09 in September and then PES2009 in October, I’ll be sorry to leave PES2008 and this particular Master League behind. I’ve had some great games in it and would count it as possibly my second-favourite ML career ever (PES5 would be #1).

But I don’t necessarily have to abandon it in Septemeber/October, of course. There’s always the PSP. I could easily continue this ML career on the PSP forever, in tandem with whatever I get up to on FIFA09/PES2009. It’s a possibility.

So, anyway, Almeria: they’re a bottom-of-the-league team this season, which naturally means they’re tougher to play against than Real Madrid and Baracelona combined. This is no lazy exaggeration, as my fellow ML players will know all too well. I couldn’t pass, I couldn’t run, I couldn’t shoot.

Almeria, with a relative handful of wins and goals to their name all season, were faster, stronger, and more skilful. They took the lead with a penalty after ten minutes. It was a rash challenge from my defender. I was too anxious to protect Cech, my new, raw, 17-year-old goalkeeper, whom I’d picked for this game just to give him some experience and start to build his teamwork rating. I felt it was worth the risk now that I haven’t got an unbeaten record to protect.

But I have still got another bonus target to aim for: conceding less than 20 goals in the league. At this stage, just after halfway, I’ve only conceded 9 goals all season. I’ve got a great chance of doing it.

When the Almeria player broke through I had no confidence in Cech stopping the goal, and I clumsily barged their player off the ball with my defender. The referee immediately gave the penalty. I was expecting a red card for the last-man challenge, but I didn’t even get a yellow. That was something, I suppose. Almeria scored the penalty and I was really up against it.

The game got to the 80th minute and it was still 0-1 to them. It looked like being another ignominious defeat. I was depressed about it. The league title was still probably safe, but after going unbeaten for so long it just felt so lame to lose a couple of games in quick succession like this. Ah, but then Andy Cole—having a quiet season, overall—popped up to score a stylish equaliser:

For anyone unable or unwilling to view the replay, I’ll describe the goal (I find embedded YouTube videos just a bit tiresome too…). Andy Cole, playing on the right up front, lays the ball off to Bradley and starts a run forward. Bradley dinks the ball over the top for Cole to chase. Still about 25 yards out, Cole takes the shot on the half-volley with a delicious scissors-kick. The ball flashes over the keeper’s head into the net. 1-1, and I had to be satisfied with that.

I won the final game of my European Championship qualifying group and finished in first place. My reward? A quarter-final tie against Barcelona. It shouldn’t be too tough, but I’d still have preferred one of the lesser teams.

In the first leg of the D1 Cup semi-final I played Real Madrid—an extremely fast and aggressive and skilful Real Madrid... Kaiser was magnificent for them, dominating play and going on runs for the hell of it. Within the first 15 minutes he’d created four clear-cut chances, two of which came back off my goal’s woodwork.

I sensed danger, somehow… I went into the Formation screen and did something I rarely do. I put a man-marker on Kaiser. I rarely see the point in man-marking, but on this occasion it seemed to work. Bradley was my chosen man and he reduced Kaiser’s effectiveness almost immediately. The game ended 0-0. The second leg will be at their ground.

Well, well, well. I don’t want to tempt fate, but it looks as if season 2018 could see all my PES2008 dreams come true. Last season was terrible from the perspective of winning things (the only perspective that really matters in any kind of football, real or imagined). My #1 goal for this season is a nice meaty Treble.

I’ve started the season like the proverbial rocket. Five wins out of five in the league. Four wins out of four in my European qualifying group (I’ve already qualified for the main tournament; the remaining two games are a formality). The Division 1 Cup is just around the corner. It’s all looking good so far.

The early season table makes for some interesting viewing. My long-time nemesis, Valencia, are apparently trailing way behind for the moment. I’m not fooled—that’ll change, and quickly. It’s still very early days.

Despite the five wins out of five in the league, my form hasn’t been that great. I haven’t played noticeably better than I did last season. The difference this season, I think, is that I’m defending slightly better.

I’m conceding less goals, on average, than I did last season. A long time ago somebody advised me that the way to defend in PES2008 (the PS2/PSP version) is not to dive in and slide-tackle and block all over the place. Instead it’s best to stand off, bide your time, bring another defender over, jostle them, harry them, snap at their heels, just get in the way. After a few hundred games now, I can fully agree. The occasions when I’ve been most frustrated with this game, defensively speaking, have been when I’ve tried to get the ball back off the CPU too quickly, and been punished. The CPU can go through your entire team like the proverbial hot knife through butter if you start falling to ground in front of it. Old habits die hard, and I still do it—I still slide-tackle all over the place for fun. I never used to play PES like this. I used to be great at defending, and adopted the stand-off, tactical mode by default. My months on the next-gen version of PES2008, the most arcadey version of the game ever, have affected me more than I know.

My fifth game of the season was against Levante. They almost spoiled the party by taking a 1-0 lead that they held onto almost to the end. 1-0 was the scoreline in the 85th minute and it looked like being the final scoreline. It was one of those suspicious games that you often get at the end of a winning streak. Suddenly you mysteriously cannot score, no matter what you try. It’s almost as if there’s a line or two of code that says something like (translated into 1980s BASIC):

IF playerwinningstreak>3 THEN LET chanceofscoring=chanceofscoring-75%

It doesn’t always work that way, of course. It just seems to. You can beat the programming, eventually. It is possible.

I got an equaliser—a precious equaliser to make it 1-1 and hopefully preserve my unbeaten run. I’d have settled for a draw. I knew I couldn’t win every game. And so the 90th minute came along. The Levante left-back had the ball and was moving upfield with it. Andy Cole was behind him. I felt like fouling him with a sliding tackle from behind to disrupt their play, so I did. It was utterly vicious, and the Levante player stayed down. But the referee waved play on, giving the advantage because the ball had broken to another Levante player (naturally). As soon as there was a break in play, Andy Cole would be getting a yellow card—it was that kind of foul.

Levante tried to move through midfield but I got the ball back with Camacho. The Levante defender was still down! A few PESes ago I might have kicked the ball out of play, but not any more. Yamada was standing wide open where the injured defender would normally have been covering. I played the simplest of through-balls…

The replay is quite amusing. It shows the Levante player on the ground injured while Yamada gleefully tucks the ball past the keeper to score the winning goal. At the very last moment, does the CPU player lift his head to look forlornly at the goal? I think he does! But you decide:

I felt a little bit bad after scoring the goal. It was my vicious foul that had put their player down on the ground, and created the hole for Yamada to loiter in and receive the ball.

In the real world my team would have kicked the ball out of play to let the player receive treatment—wrongly, in my opinion. Surely I’m not the only football-watcher in the world who has noticed that real-life players are completely abusing the whole ‘kick the ball out of play for an injury’ convention in order to snuff out the other team’s tactical advantages?

But anyway, this was a computer game, not real life, so the referee was not surrounded by protesting Levante players after the goal. I won it 2-1 and Andy Cole didn’t even get booked for the challenge. After I scored, the referee ‘forgot’ about the foul. I love computer games.

A rapid-fire round of games in the League, the Cup, and the European Cup against Espanyol, Benfica, and Espanyol again, saw me win, win, and win… I’ve been on a pretty good run since I took a break from the game for a couple of days. In the future I’ll be alert to the signs of PES fatigue and will take action appropriately.

I’ve forgotten to mention all this season that Andy Cole is banging in the goals regularly for me in all competitions. In the League he’s the joint-top goalscorer right now with 15 goals.

I rarely have the top goalscorer. Generally I’ll win one Golden Boot in every 10 seasons or so of Master League. That’s not very good, but as I keep saying nor am I very good (at PES), and it’s true, so it makes sense that I should only win the Golden Boot once in a virtual blue moon. One of the many things I had against next-gen PES2008 is that I could win the Golden Boot every season without any effort whatsoever.

This batch of games on the PS3 and the widescreen TV had to come to an end. I wanted to carry on playing at work, and in transit to and from work, so back onto the PSP I had to go. I was dreading the transition after getting used again to the luxury of the big, proper controller and the big, proper screen, but it was fine. I think the transition the other way—from PSP to PS3—is the one that always catches me out. Hopefully I’ll be ready for it when it comes around again.

I played a peculiar string of games where I took 1-0 leads and then had to hang on for grim life until the end. And I did so on each occasion. There were about four games in a row like that. 1-0 most of the way through and at the final whistle. Strange.

The run of 1-0s was broken when I came up against Barcelona in the league. I beat them 2-1. I haven’t lost in the league for about eight games now. I’ve only drawn one or two. This is very healthy form to be in. As I expected, Valencia at the top have started to drop points and I am catching up with them. I am now just 5 points behind. Looking at the table with a pragmatic eye, I cannot guarantee that I’ll overhaul Valencia as I did—just—last season. I should concentrate on fending off the teams below me in order to ensure at least a second-place finish. I’ll try to do both. I’ll try to maintain my challenge whilst simultaneously holding onto that 2nd spot if the worst happens. I don’t fancy a long qualifying campaign for Europe at the start of next season.

Every run of great form has to come to an end. Mine did so in a worrying and potentially Treble-killing fashion. My next European Cup opponents in the knockout stages were Valencia—yes, the top AI team in my Master League. I dread playing them twice per season as it is. As much as I dread playing Osasuna, I dread Valencia more. They really are rather good…

I was at home, so my gameplan was to not concede anything and see if I could at least snatch one goal to take with me to their place. After half an hour all seemed to be going to plan. I scored a nice little goal with Kim Cyun Hi. This season Kim’s been very much in the shadow of Andy Cole, and of my sky-high expectations of him. So far he’s not really doing it week in, week out. But he’s still young, I keep telling myself. He’s got another few seasons to prove himself yet.

Valencia went into their usual overdrive mode. I can usually cope with it pretty well. Not on this occasion. They blasted me all through the second half with some wonderfully aggressive possession football. I can’t really say that my players had had their abilities disabled (that’s my usual complaint). I didn’t really play well. I was impatient and bad-tempered with the game. Valencia scored two great away goals and won the match 1-2. With the second leg at their place, I’m up against it. I’ll need to score at least two away goals myself to have any chance. A tall order.

One last thing. I rarely feature CPU goals on the blog, but I’ll make an exception in this case. With the score tied at 1-1 midway through the second half of our European game, Valencia won a free kick near my box. What followed was the kind of goal that you rarely see the AI scoring in PES. Any human player would have been proud of this one: