PES Chronicles

For the first time since I started playing PES2009, I’m seriously challenging for the Division 1 Championship. I’m slightly disappointed that it’s taken me until season 2017 of this Master League career to get to this stage. I’m usually a bit quicker about it than this, historically speaking. But better late than never.

With one game left I was on top of the table, and thus in a position to determine my own fate. I was one point clear of the 2nd-placed team, AC Milan. The 3rd-placed team, Roma, were two points behind me. The critical thing about my situation was that my goal difference was appreciably worse than both of these sides. I had to win my last match to be sure of taking the title.

My opponents were AIK Athens. They’ve been my bogey team so far in this PES. It was Osasuna last year. PES games traditionally burden you with relatively obscure teams snapping at your heels even when your team is tricked out with the equivalent of 11 Maradonas.

So I was wary of the match and what it might do to me. I felt that I had to win it—that a draw wouldn’t be good enough. That’s the way PES works, with me at least. You have to do your bit.

But I was too cautious. I should have just played my own game, bogey team or no bogey team. Athens scored a ridiculous soft goal midway through the first half. It was one of those goals that gets deflected off your defender’s arse, and then bobbles across the virtual turf to take another deflection off your goalkeeper’s arse too (just for good measure, to really rub it in) before trickling into the net.

Thankfully I scored my equaliser almost straightaway. Otherwise the nerves would really have been jangling. I went in at half-time with the score 1-1. That’s when I decided to check the other matches’ results—something I almost never do except under circumstances like these.

I discovered that my match was the sole evening fixture. AC Milan and Roma had already played their matches. Milan had lost their match. Roma had drawn theirs. It didn’t matter what happened in the second half here. Coventry City were already the Division 1 champions.

Anti-climactic? A little, I confess. I would have preferred for the title finally to be won with a grandstand finish in the second half in this match against Athens. But a title is decided over a season made up of 38 matches. Not just 1.

In that second half I naturally played with a more relaxed outlook. It didn’t matter if Athens thrashed me 100-nil. I’d won the title. The match carried on at 1-1 despite me having the lion’s share of possession and chances—many of them solid gold chances that mysteriously failed to translate into goals (the same old PES2009 story).

Then, near the end, I got this odd little goal with Shaw. In the clip I’ve switched the camera view to track Shaw. He runs to receive the floated through-ball—and apparently breaks his leg to flick the ball into the net:

The clip’s poor quality. (Aren’t they all—I do keep meaning to pick up a high-quality camera, or even a DVD recorder, but so far I, er, haven’t.) You can just make out Shaw’s lower left leg suddenly jumping out at a right angle to his body. I’ve heard of similar glitches in PES2009 but this is the first one I’ve seen for myself.

Did I care that I’d scored what looked like the winning goal with a glitch? Did I hell. It didn’t matter anyway. It was just nice to beat my bogey team.

Or so I thought. Naturally, they swept upfield straight from the kick-off and scored their equaliser. 2-2 it finished. Never mind. We are the bloody champions!

After sitting through the above celebrations on the pitch, it was time to feast my eyes on the dressing-room celebrations that I’d heard so much about but not quite been able to believe. I watched, bemused, as several players dressed in strange black kits jumped about and danced and sang in a fluorescent-lit dressing room. After a moment I realised that I recognised none of the players and the kits they were all wearing were AIK Athens kits. I was witnessing a stupid bug. AIK Athens were being shown instead of my team. I have no idea why. Athens were the home team for this fixture. Maybe that’s the bug: only the home team can be shown celebrating in the dressing room after a title win. Ah well.

Here’s the final table:

Here’s the intriguing final statistics for season 2017:

With that record I had no right to win the title. A win % of 55.26 is not a title-winning performance. I think the game threw me a massive bone this season. But sometimes it’s best not to peek behind that curtain where the great Wizard named Seabass sits and operates his infernal machinery. So I won’t.

But that poor end-of-season record does at least mean that I still have something to aim for. A ‘proper’ league title win, with a healthier win % (and lots more goals scored).

Oh, and there’s still one more thing to go for, of course, in season 2018 and beyond. The Holy Grail of Master League. THE TREBLE.

——————

My next post will be on Thursday. I’m taking tomorrow off to, ah, rob a bank or something. From now on I’ll probably take a day off after the completion of every season. A day’s gap provides some natural breathing space between seasons for readers—and for me.

There are four games left in my 5th season in Master League on PES2009. I’m second in the Division 2 table and playing well. I’m looking good for promotion. Anything could still happen, but realistically I don’t think anything can stop me getting promoted to Division 1 now. That doesn’t mean the CPU isn’t giving it a good try anyway.

Bogey teams. Every year, it seems there’s one. Osasuna tormented me for several seasons on the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. I’ve yet to encounter Osasuna in PES2009. I don’t know what Division they’re in (or even if they’re in).

Keeping their seat warm are AIK Athens. My newest, and most maddening, bogey team.

I don’t think I’ve beaten Athens at all in any of the dozen-or-so matches we’ve had down here in Division 2. I’ve played them twice a season in the league, and we’ve had a couple of Cup encounters. They always DO me. Somehow, even if the game is a draw, it’s one where I feel aggrieved. And most often, of course, they simply beat me. I’m more certain than ever that there’s some kind of dice-roll at the start of an ML career, and the game chooses a team to be your bogey team.

Another annoyance has resurfaced. Occasionally one of my players will viciously tackle a CPU player from behind, without any conscious input from me. This one is specific to PES2009, and I haven’t had to contend with it for a few seasons now. So I don’t know what has happened. This ‘auto-tackle’ feature of PES2009 has been commented on and discussed across the PES community. I know it’s not just me who experiences it.

It’s frustrating and wrong, as it results in penalties, yellow cards, red cards, hassles, and heartaches. I saw it happen a few times in my first season. Then it stopped, and I thought I’d sussed out why it was happening: overuse of the secondary pressure button. So I eased off on Square (it’s a good idea to do that anyway), and the auto-tackles stopped. Problem, I thought, solved. But no—now they’re back, and I have no idea why. I’m not mashing the Square button again. Honest.

It’s possible that I’m not paying sufficient attention to the game. Inevitably, after so much time on any game, there’s sometimes a creeping detachment from the action. Sometimes the mind just wanders, and you notice that you’ve sleepwalked through a passage of play, or a whole half. That’s not how to play PES2009—or any game, really.

Thanks to the auto-tackle I was reduced to 10 men in consecutive games. I won the second of those games 1-0 with a joyous late goal against all odds. So things aren’t all bad.

As the season draws towards its end I find myself looking forward to playing in Division 1. I’m 7 points clear of the fourth-placed team. I can’t fail from here. Can I? If I fail now I’ll be genuinely gutted.

My next game is against the league-leaders, Middlesbrough. They’ve always been buggers to play against in Master League. It’s a big game and I’ll be focused for it. I’d love to go up to Division 1 as champions.

I think I’ve identified the problem. Yesterday I said I was going back to my PS3 Manager Mode career with Coventry City. The one I started on the Xbox360 with Atletico Madrid was proving too tough for me and I didn’t know why. Yes, there are better teams in the top Spanish league than there are in the English Coca Cola Championship. But it shouldn’t be so tough—on the same difficulty and control settings—that I was in danger of getting fired by Atletico. Should it?

Of course, the answer turned out to be simple. I was trying too hard to score a ’showbiz’ goal, as Mark Hughes used to call them (and often score them) back in his playing days. I needed to calm down and just try to get bread and butter goals, and pick up points and move up the table, and let the showbiz goals take care of themselves. Let them come naturally in the fullness of time.

Which is what I did. Results came immediately. My first game ended 2-0 to me. I drew the next game 2-2, but should have won it (see below). And I won the third game of the session 1-0. Here’s one of those bread and butter goals, which came about after I switched to a wide formation in the tactics editor. I wasn’t getting this kind of space until I did:

Total bread and butter, that goal. After my troubles of yesterday I felt as happy with it as I would have done with a 40-yard screamer. Well, almost as happy.

I did score a slightly prettier goal during this session. I uploaded it, but I made the mistake of submitting it to EA Sportsworld in slow-motion, and somehow it snipped off the part where the actual goal was scored. So there’s no point showing it here. For the record, it was a delicious outside-of-the-boot finish from Maxi Rodriguez, scored from a long, pretty aimless cross that’d bobbled to him across the penalty box. It went in off the far post.

I have stopped using YouTube to stream goals to this blog, possibly for good. The new site—LiveLeak—allows you to directly upload .flv video files (YouTube doesn’t), and there is little or no loss of quality. I’d never heard of this LiveLeak place until I saw them mentioned on Evo-Web the other day. I hope they’re not one of these fly-by-night setups and I can use them for a good long while.

So. I’d been trying to score stunners, long-range screamers that I could show off here, rather than just concentrating on winning the match, which is what real football is all about. And can there be any doubt that FIFA09, for better or worse, is all about real football? I don’t think there’s an argument left to be had.

There’s got to be a downside. In the middle of my three games I came up against… Osasuna.

Regular readers will recall that Osasuna were my bogey team in the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. (A very good PES game and one I will return to at some point this year). Back then it seemed that every season they were primed to frustrate me no matter what I did or how well I played. Surely the hoodoo couldn’t translate into a whole new ball game?

It bloody well could translate. I went into a 2-0 lead against them and I thought: that’s it, I’ve cracked it at last… Naturally, this heralded an Osasuna fightback. I’ve noticed in FIFA09 that there is a kind of momentum (in Seabass’ dread phrase) that the CPU can build up when it’s behind. The possession bonus that it enjoyed in FIFA08 is still in 09, only it’s a bit more subtle I think. You don’t see the CPU players twisty-turning on the wings to the same infuriating degree, but they still have the old possession ‘magic’ when they need it.

Of course, it’s up to the human player to defend better. With discipline and patience. I didn’t.

Osasuna came back to draw 2-2. Of course they did. I threw everything at them in the last minutes, aching for the winner. I was horribly frustrated. Bloody Osasuna! They’d only gone and done me again. I’ll be watching out for the return fixture later in the season.

Osasuna. They’ve only gone and done it again. I’m officially declaring them my bogey team. Forget Valencia, Barca, Real, Deportivo—when Osasuna are in town, I tremble. They’ve pulled off yet another one of their patented 1-0 victories over me. I was cursing the place down at ten o’clock in the morning. Is it ever too early to swear?

I think it’s the third season in a row that they’ve managed to do it, and each time the game has always played out the same way. They got their early goal and somehow resisted all two million of my subsequent attempts on their goal. Their goal came from a cross that ricocheted off my defender—Maldini, one of the top defenders in the entire game, whose astronomic stats were unable to stop him becoming a statue and letting the ball simply bounce off his knees, ignoring my repeated and determined hammering of the Square button to clear it. The ricochet travelled across the six yard box direct to the feet of Osasuna’s lone striker, who strangely blasted it back across the area instead of into the net. Happily for him, though, my other top-rated centre-back, Fernandez, was keen to deflect it into my net off his knees for an amusing own-goal. So that was fine.

The rest of the game, despite me having the regulation bazillion chances, was curious. Osasuna had some good possession and created further chances of their own. They had 12 chances overall, which is about 11 more than they usually make against me. I knew the game was going to end 1-0 to them almost from the start. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps. But no, probably not.

Newly-promoted AIK gave me a tough game. Who the hell are they, anyway? I literally cannot remember ever playing them before, although I know that I must have, even if the last time was down in Division 2 all those seasons ago.

After the Osasuna farce I really wanted a win to stay in close touch with the top of the table. So I really focused hard and set out to keep another very determined CPU team at bay. If I could shut them out at the back, that’d be half the job done. It worked and I was 2-0 up heading into the last ten minutes. Then, of course, they had to get their regulation, automatic CPU goal. It had to be 2-1 for the last few minutes. There’s just no way of avoiding it sometimes. (Too many times.)

I held on for the win. Then came the season’s first league fixture against Barcelona. I hammered them 6-3. Pulverised them. Andy Cole got a hat-trick in this game. Kim Cyun Hi got two goals. I forget who got the sixth. I was 6-0 up by 65 minutes. Again, the CPU started scoring automatic goals, but not even a script could threaten to overturn this result.

At the moment, the best all-round striker currently on my books is Andy Cole. He’s neck-and-neck with Kim Cyun Hi for top scorer. In the long term I suspect Kim Cyun Hi will easily eclipse him, but for now Cole is the main man. Giggs isn’t too far behind either. In fact, come to think of it, all of my players are great. I haven’t got one turkey. Even Larsson, who I’ve had for about nine seasons now but have left underused and thus underdeveloped, has started to come through. Perhaps only Donk is a weak link, but he never lets me down on the rare occasions when he stands in for one of the other CBs.