PES Chronicles

I’ve started two separate Manager Mode careers on FIFA09. One on the PS3, with my traditional Coventry City. The other on the Xbox360, with Atletico Madrid, a team I played with online the other night and absolutely loved.

It’s unusual for me to play two careers. I love the immersion factor when it comes to a football game’s career mode. Spreading that attention across two careers means less focus and less immersion. But there’s a good reason for my apparent recklessness right now.

A week tomorrow, PES2009 should land on my doorstep (GAME willing). If it turns out to be any good, I know I’ll want to play it, and I’ll want to play Master League most of all. I doubt the new PES will displace FIFA09 in my affections now. There is just too much water under the bridge for PES—in its current arcadey form—ever to occupy the place it once did in my affections. It still pains me to say that, and I know what to blame. PES2008 on the PS3 represented a massive betrayal of one of the richest heritages in computer gaming.

But if the PES2009 demo is anything to go by, at least this year’s game might be playable for more than a few weeks. Certainly it’ll do me no harm—and a lot of good—to have a lighter alternative to FIFA09.

Which would mean less attention for those two Manager Mode careers I was talking about. But that’d be fine. I’ll always come back to them. And in the meantime I can have—buzzword coming up—fun playing them while I wait for PES2009 to land.

The career as Coventry City started with a win and a few draws. But then I encountered that through-ball bug towards the end of a crucial game. Which slightly soured me on FIFA09 for a day or two. At the moment I’m mid-table, having lost the last two fixtures in league and cup. I’m in no danger of being sacked. The goal for the season is to avoid relegation from the Coca Cola Championship. I’ll do that.

Atletico Madrid, on the other hand… In this career the board only wants me to win the Spanish title. Gulp. This is actually my first experience of starting Manager Mode with a top club, and I hope I don’t get sacked for my trouble. So far I’ve played just the one game and it ended 0-0. And who is that midfielder wearing the number 24 shirt…?

Yep, that’s the one and only Camacho, in his real-life guise of reserve central defensive midfielder at Atletico Madrid. I spent so many seasons playing with him in my PS2/PSP Master League career on PES2008 that the moment I saw him here in FIFA09, I had to promote him to the first-team lineup. I’ll be keeping an eye on his progress (he was rubbish in this game).

Finally, I’ve got the whole uploading-to-EA-Sportsworld thing cracked. It works for me this year, after not working at all last year. What this means for the blog is that the days of poor quality mobile phone videos for goals in FIFA are behind us. As long as the replay uploads keep working, of course..

I’ve tried my best to score a show-stopping, net-bursting goal to show off as my very first ‘proper’ replay. But I’ve been like Frank Lampard at Germany 2006 out there. It hasn’t happened yet. So instead what I have is a glaring MISS in front of goal. This is what can happen in FIFA09 when you get it wrong while using semi-manual shooting:

With full shooting assists on, that would have been on target for the low corner of the net and would probably have been a goal. No question. Which is precisely why semi-manual shooting is so great: you need composure and accuracy in front of goal, something I blatantly lacked here.

Here we go again. It feels as if I’ve been playing PES forever. It feels as if I’ve been playing this particular Master League career for even longer than forever. If that’s even possible, which it isn’t, what with ‘forever’ being an abstract concept and all. It’s impossible for anything to be longer or shorter than an abstract concept. I’m drifting… Is it October yet? Not yet. That’s when PES2009 will appear, and I can’t wait. Hang on… Is it September yet? Not yet. That’s when FIFA09 will appear—the game that’s got the PES community buzzing like no other FIFA before it—and I likewise cannot wait. But naturally, yes, I can wait and I will wait. Ho hum.

That rather whimsical opening doesn’t mean I’m tiring of PES2008. Historically I play an instalment of PES until the eve of the next instalment’s release. I don’t see any reason why this year should be any different. Granted, FIFA09 will pop up about a month before PES2009. That just might alter the complexion of the PES build-up this year. But in some form I expect to be playing PES2008 right until the end.

Season 2018 started with an opening league fixture against… Valencia. They’re the big boys of the division and have been for a couple of seasons. Talk about an early season six-pointer. This was the big one, straightaway.

It was as tough a game as I expected it to be. The ebbs and flows of this individual Master League have turned Valencia into a monster of a team—one of the best AI teams I’ve ever played against in any PES.

I struggled to get a shot on goal in the first half, but started to come good just when 45 minutes were up. I could have done without half-time getting in the way. After the break it was back to the same dour stalemate. Just when it was looking like a 0-0, I got a corner. I lofted the ball into a packed penalty box. Valencia managed to clear it—straight to the feet of Camacho. Usually I’d have just blasted it, but I saw the packed penalty box and knew I had to try to pick my spot. Here’s the replay showing the placement of the resulting shot (the initial chaos after the corner is reflected by not being immediately able to see the ball at the start of the clip!):

I loved that goal. Not just for how it was socred (I rarely get to deliberately pick my spot like that), but for what it represented. The final whistle went a few minutes later and I’d won the early season six-pointer.

In fact it’s been a great start to the season all round. I won my first European game, against Olympiacos Piraeus, 2-0. I’ve got to play through a qualifying group to get into the European Cup equivalent—this is always a real pain. I hate the fixture pile-up. I always want to just get on with the league at the start of a season, but qualifying means there’s a European game every week from the start. Oh well.

League game number two was against Barcelona. I’m trying to be a bit stingy at the back this season—conceding less goals is one of my long-term ambitions. (It might also help me, you know, win things too.)

So imagine my disappointment when Barca streaked into an early 2-0 lead. Oh no. What had happened? Never mind. I knuckled down, went all-out for goals, and got them.

Barcelona are not very good in my Master League. They’ve still got a quite-good—albeit ageing—Rooney and Torres pairing up front. Those two can still torment me every now and then, and they did so in this game with a goal each. But overall? I worry more about playing the likes of Zaragoza. I came back to beat Barca 3-2 with surprising ease. I’m 3rd in the league, level on points with the current leaders (Deportivo) but with an inferior goal difference. For now…

Barcelona—it was the first time that we met. Barcelona—how can I forget? The moment that you stepped into the room you—

That’s quite enough of that. Within a few weeks, Barcelona have been my opponents five times: once in the league, twice in the Division 1 Cup, and twice in the European Championships.

I’m finding that Barcelona are a strange package in this Master League career. I rarely have trouble beating them and they never seem to do anything special in the league. At the end of each season they’re usually hanging around in the top 6, but nowhere near challenging for the title. And I think it might all be my fault.

When I set up this league I omitted the English clubs. This sent all the English clubs’ players onto the open market, from where the existing clubs—spread across all four leagues—snapped them up. The end result is that in many cases the English club players seem to have diluted the strength of some clubs, Barcelona being one of them. Jamie Carragher is currently at Barcelona in my Master League. Now, I think Jamie Carragher in real life is a fine player, but in PES he could only really be considered an above-average player. Although Real Madrid, for one, seem to have been peculiarly boosted by their acquisition of the likes of Mark Noble (yes, Mark Noble).

I don’t know. Maybe Barcelona being mediocre isn’t all my fault. They sure are easy to beat, though. Most of the time. I beat them in the League. I absolutely thumped them in the Division 1 Cup. Leathered them. Hammered them into oblivion—as per the screenshot. (That’s a 9-3 scoreline to me, if it’s a bit too blurry.)

In the first of our two European group games, things weren’t much different—it was an easy 3-0 to me. In the second tie, though… I had a nightmare, and went down 0-1 early on. Then I started hacking away at the opposition as I like to do sometimes. Cutting to the chase, I was down to eight men by the second half. I was 0-1 behind and three players down against Barcelona. Even an average Barcelona should romp home to victory now. Things were not looking good.

But, while it was still only 0-1 to Barca, there was always a chance… I came to my senses. I rejigged my formation into an emergency 3-3-1, as seen in the diagram. I went with three CBs and pulled my DMF all the way back—as far back as he would go on the formation screen—to sit just in front of them. I pulled my two AMFs all the way back as well, to sit just behind the halfway line. I had a lone CF—Kim Cyun Hi—who was also sitting as deep as possible.

I brought on Komol to play as the left-sided AMF, despite it not being one of his positions. I’ve played with Komol for almost ten seasons now and I know I can rely on him to get me out of a tight spot. Immediately I took him off on a swashbuckling run across the pitch that led to a shot that hit the post… And Kim Cyun Hi was on hand to knock in the rebound.

1-1, and I was prepared to settle for that. I set my ATT/DEF level to full defence and prepared to see out the remaining ten minutes. I anticipated it being difficult. My plan was to defend doggedly and try to hold up the ball in midfield whenever I got possession. I would just run down the clock if I could.

However. Camacho—dear old Camacho (he’s 27 now!)—had the ball in the wide AMF position. The entire Barcelona team seemed to be swarming around my few attackers. The replay shows how many they were and how few I was. I felt in my water that Barca would win the ball back from me in a moment if I tried to keep passing it around. In PES, you end up just knowing when the CPU has decided to get the ball back. So I took a shot with Camacho, a speculative shot:

Yessssss……. 2-1 to me it ended. I’d scored twice in the second half whilst 0-1 down and having had three players sent off. Despite the sheer unrealism of it all, I was delirious. This is the kind of thing that I play PES for. I’d hate it if it happened too often, of course. But once in a while? It’s the feeling I get from occasions like those that keeps me playing PES.

Sometimes, individual goals can change seasons—or save them, which amounts to the same thing. Sometimes, one moment of inspiration can make the difference between winning and ‘only’ drawing a game, between 3 points and 1 point.

In the league, my form has carried on much as before. I’m still winning more than I’m losing, but a couple of expensive draws are keeping me down in 3rd place, as the blurry picture below will testify. I don’t know why my hand shakes so much sometimes…

The European Championships group phase has started. and it’s started badly. My group opponents are Benfica, Sochaux, and Barcelona (again with the Barcelona… that’s two seasons in a row that they’ve been in my Euro group).

Benfica beat me 2-1. Ouch. They were 2-0 up and holding me at bay with ease. In the 75th minute I pulled one back with Schwarz, but it was too late. I tried my best, and chased after the ball like a madman, but after I’d scored that one goal I barely got another kick. Isn’t it odd how the CPU team can just maddeningly hold onto the ball when you want to get it off them the most? Most amusing to me are those instances when you do win the ball, fair and square, but you’re obviously not ’supposed’ to win it—and the game forces your player(s) through a few animation ‘frames of no control’, automated sequences that you cannot interrupt, enabling the CPU to retrieve possession. Rant ends.

It was a bad start to the group phase. I’m going for the Treble this season (as ever) and I can’t afford any more slip-ups. So imagine my deep chagrin when, in the second group game against Sochaux, it was looking like a 0-0 all the way. It was just one of those games—the ball mired in midfield, none of my wingplay coming to fruition, none of my few shots troubling the keeper. By the 85th minute I’d more or less accepted the draw, and was focused on not conceding a ‘traditional late winner’ to the CPU…

Then it happened. Camacho had had a quiet game in the DMF position (Bradley was unfit). He got the ball just inside the centre circle, played a one-two with Komol, and rifled the ball into the net. Here’s the original view:

A lot was happening there. First, there was the decision to play a one-two rather than take Camacho on a solo dribble. My playing style is strictly pass and move. It’s not that I’m not anti-dribbling in PES. I’m just not very good at it. I can beat one player easily enough, but then I’ll run into trouble after getting excited. (This is not the time or the place to start talking about the dribblefest that is the PS3 version. Suffice to say: meh.)

Having initiated the one-two with Komol, my next decision was what to do next. I don’t think I ever return one-two passes straightaway. I always hold onto the ball for at least a second or two, waiting to see if the passer will run on into a better kind of space. One with less opposition players around him, and more space in front of him.

That’s where Camacho got to on this occasion. Komol had held up the ball for what felt like a long time. Mostly in PES2008, that’s just asking to be swarmed by the CPU. I got away with it this time, and played it back to Camacho, completing the one-two.

Now he sprinted on with the ball for another stride, two strides. That space in front of him was suddenly being filled by an oncoming CPU defender. That’s another thing about PES2008: the way defenders will suddenly just be there, racing at you from off-screen. And the two chasing defenders were catching up. Three enemy players, incoming.

With a few virtual yards of space just ahead of me, I knew that the time to do something with the ball—pass, or shoot—was now. If I delayed any further, even though it looked like I still had time, the defender(s) would be upon me before I could take action. So what should I do?

I was only ever going to SHOOT, here. I had the shot cued up even before Camacho had recieved the ball back from Komol. The likelihood of me trying to take on the defender and/or fake-shoot and shimmy past him, was literally 0%. I really do just play pass and move. It’s all shamefully true.

Viewed from pitch-level, the first thing that strikes me is just how long I hold up the ball with Komol. It seems to be an age. An unimaginable length of time. The return pass finds Camacho and he takes it in his stride (his impressive stats coming to the fore)—and then he seems to have more time than I remember in which to take on a weirdly stationary defender. Hmmm. For some reason, in the original view (and at the time of playing it ‘live’), that defender had seemed to be running full tilt at me.

The shot, when it comes, is indeed rifled into the corner. The keeper had no chance. And that was that. I won the game 1-0. Sochaux went on a token run up the pitch and almost shocked me with an instant equaliser, but I held them off. That Camacho goal could be a massive goal for my season.