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.

“Every failure carries within it the seed of an equivalent or greater success.”

Thus Napoleon Hill, one of the fathers of modern-day personal development/self-help literature, speaking in the 1930s.

What he could have had in mind was my 8-1 defeat—nay, my 8-1 thrashing—by Sparta Rotterdam back at the start of the season, and the outcome that it has led to today.

I have won the league. Coventry City are Division 2 champions. I’ll be playing with the big boys next season. Better late than never. Whew. It feels very sweet, believe me.

If I hadn’t lost that opening game in the way that I did, I might have continued taking PES2008 rather lightly. As it turned out, the thrashing (ouch) focused my mind very effectively. My recovery started from the very next game, which I won with a level of concentration and patience that I don’t think I would have had otherwise.

As the season went on I only grew in confidence. The 8-1 humiliation really did plant the seed that grew the triumph.

I still didn’t have things easy during the last two games. I needed to win them both to be certain of promotion and the title, but I lost the first one 0-1 to AIK Athens (a bit of a bogey team). After the game I noticed that I’d been promoted anyway. I could now only finish in second place as a worse-case scenario.

I still wanted the league, though. I had to win my last game against Levante to be sure.

It started badly, with them scoring early to put me 0-1 down and on the back foot. I hate it when I go behind early in big games. When that happens, what we all fear is that the script is being written right before our eyes and there is little or no actual ‘free will’ involved. After all these years on PES and all these (it must be) thousands of games, I believe that some element of scripting is undeniable. I’m not saying that I was irrevocably meant to go 0-1 down early on in this big championship decider—but I’m sure it was a lot more likely that I would.

I fretted, worried for my team and for MY title. I already regarded it as my title. (Napoleon Hill would have approved…)

Midway through the second half, that phenomenon of PES2008, Camacho, received the ball in his customary wide-right position. Somehow I cut back and inside the defender, in a way that I used to do for fun on PES6 all the time, but which they’ve altered for PES2008 just enough to make it tricky.

A few more strides with Camacho toward the goal, and I unleashed yet another picture-book long-ranger:

(Camacho, I’ve just noticed, wears the number 23 in my squad. It wasn’t deliberate. William Burroughs—and Napoleon Hill?—would approve.)

The 1-1 draw was enough to take the title. Happiness is not a cigar called Hamlet; happiness is winning the Division 2 title in Pro Evolution Soccer after several seasons of taking regular beatings.

Season 2012 approaches. When I set up this Master League, in haste, back on the whatever-it-was-of-March when the PSP game plopped through my letterbox and I was all excited, I threw myself in with the game’s equivalent of La Liga. Next season I’ll be in the thick of it with Real Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia & co. That’s fine with me. I played two careers with the English clubs on the benighted PS3 version and I won’t miss them this time around.

Right. Here we go. It’s the first game after the negotiations. I’ve picked up some more players to ‘cushion’ my squad. I think I’ve got the hang of PES2008 now. No more excuses. Promotion here I come.

This was a great game—truly memorable for so many reasons and, I think, the turning-point for me and the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008.

I was a Podolski goal up and cruising when the CPU’s God Mode kicked in. Levante got the ball and kept it until they scored to make it 1-1. Oh well, I thought. At least now I’ll be able to get the ball back. But no: they kept it again, until they scored again. 2-1 to them. For the love of… Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean. Breathe.

I started to keep it at the back and knock it around a bit. This is the golden rule, I hear, when you think the CPU is cheating or trying to cheat. Just keep the ball. Pass it around. Pass it back constantly if you have to. Don’t let the CPU torment you.

It paid off before half time. A corner out on the left rebounded to Camacho, who provided a delightful side-footed finish:

Camacho’s most significant goal for me yet. It got me back into the game at 2-2.

Half time came and went. I scored another three goals in the second half—two of them from Podolski, to complete his hat trick. Both were headers from Roberto Carlos crosses. The young Brazilian is already playing like a legend.

All of which lifts me up to the heady heights of fourth place. I’m only 3 points off second place and one of those lovely promotion spots. Alas, my goal difference remains poor. That 8-1 hammering I took at the start of the season is taking its toll, despite a couple of big wins of my own.

But if I keep playing well—and I am playing well, now; I think I finally get what the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008 is all about—then I’ll not only make up the goal difference, but get enough points on the board for it probably not to matter.