Could this be the season? As I suspected would happen, losing most of my Master League squad to the end-of-season attrition of salary payments has actually improved my game. I’m concentrating better and playing better.

Now when I get a 1-0 lead I treat it like a fragile egg that I mustn’t drop. This is my traditionally roundabout way of saying that I’ve started picking up wins. With a squad of 17 players! Who are nearly always knackered! It’s a funny old world.

Here (left) is my full, complete, actual current squad again. I still can’t believe I’m actually trying to play PES2009’s rather tough Master League with this paltry roster of players. I did okay on the PS2/PSP version of PES2008 for half a season with a squad of 16—but that was then and this is now. PES2009 is, rather gratifyingly, a wholly different game.

Of course, I won’t have to survive the whole of this season with 17 players. I just have to make it to mid-season, and then I can pick up some fresh players. And then at the end of the season, if need be, have another mass clear-out. This could become a vicious circle.

What I need to do to break out of the circle is simple: start winning. Winning brings points not just in the league table, but in the bank. And what do points make?

I’ve finally scored a long-range goal in PES2009 worthy of posting on the blog. It’s not the most outrageously spectacular long-range goal ever seen in a PES game. But it’s my first true long-ranger PES2009. It feels really tough to score them this year. Making space for the shot is hard enough. The build-up to this goal is one of the few times I’ve found enough space in midfield to have a reasonable chance of scoring. GAMBINO (my only MIddle Shooting-equipped midfielder) is the triggerman:

I enjoyed it. From this angle and speed it doesn’t look nearly as good as it looked ‘live’. But they never do, do they?

Here’s the surprising current table—I’m doing quite well:

Only scoring 5 goals in 8 games is pretty poor, really. But I’m not conceding many either, crucially. And—I don’t want to be hasty, but I think I may have solved the corner problem. This is where the CPU will almost automatically score itself a goal from a corner kick whenever it needs one. I’ve discovered how to drastically reduce the instances of this. I doubt you could ever completely stop it: some CPU goals are just meant to be. We know it. Seabass knows it. Seabass knows that we know it. And he doesn’t care.

All I do is watch the penalty area just before the kick is taken. A CPU runner will dart around in the box. I follow him with my controlled player and make sure I’m in front of him when the kick comes over. But that’s only half of the equation. I still have to time the jump and header right. It’s no good pressing jump too early and hoping the game will interpret my wishes for me, and jump my defender at the right time. Doing that—pressing too early and letting the game do the work for me—is a bad habit learned way back around PES3, I think. 

Using this method I’ve gone from conceding at about 80% of CPU corners to conceding at about 10% of them. It really does work. Admittedly a large part of this is simply having better players, of course, but the method was also working quite well when I still had the likes of Baumann playing at CB.

Season 2009-2010 in my PES2009 Master League career has brought little else except defeat, defeat, defeat. The odd draw. Then defeat, defeat, defeat… Some of my ‘favourite’ old bugbears about PES are starting to show themselves again. Corners, for one thing. There are times in PES2009 when, if the CPU gets a corner, it’s as good as scored a goal already. I’d almost rather concede a penalty than a corner.

The CPU is making mincemeat out of me. I’m not conceding many goals but I’m not creating much myself. It’s grim out there and I’m struggling to understand why. I have got a pretty good team already. Granted, the players I’ve signed are only above-average at best, but I should still be picking up results and building some kind of momentum by now.

PES2009 seems a pretty hard game to me at the moment. That might make more seasoned players smile and shake their heads, but I’ve made no secret of my average abilities. I suppose that I’ve just got to wait slightly longer before I pick up this PES’s signature moves and little tricks. I’m sure I’ll get to the ‘tipping point’ soon enough. I just hope things don’t turn into another PES2008-style disaster when I do get there.

I’m firmly bottom of the table heading into the mid-season negotiations. I still haven’t won a single game. I was 1-0 up until the 88th minute of my last game. I was defending pretty well and thought I’d bagged a result a last. Then I conceded a corner… and 1-1 was the final score. I was genuinely upset about it.

General PES2009 gameplay is starting to open up to me. I’m still finding it very more-ish, but the negatives are more apparent now.

Passing is sometimes very poor, especially in comparison to FIFA09. There are frequent comedy moments when you point up-and-left with the analogue stick—and you know you’re pointing up-and-left, and there is no doubt whatsoever that you’re pointing up-and-left—but the pass goes up-and-right to a CPU player instead.

Shooting sometimes has a similar bizarre interventionist approach when one-on-one with the keepers. Clean through with just the keeper to beat, I’ll often aim to the left only for the game to execute a side-foot animation (it loves that side-foot animation) and slot the ball to the right. I hate it when it does that. Thankfully, I’ve only seen it about three or four times in what must be 50 matches now. But that’s three or four times too often.

In terms of translating what the human player wants to do into the action taking place on-screen, FIFA09 is so far ahead of PES2009 that it’s not even funny any more. Get your finger out, Seabass.

After a few weeks of playing FIFA09, I’d learned its special controls to the extent that I’m still trying to use them in PES2009. Occasionally I still try to use the right-stick to perform a first touch/knock-on in PES2009, for example—with amusing results. The right stick is a manual pass in PES2009, which turns out to have a surprising level of actual usefulness. I’ll get to that later in the week.

And I also keep tapping L1 while I have possession, farcically trying—and failing—to make my players go on runs. They don’t, of course, and I just feel idiotic. This is something I really, really miss from FIFA09. It could do with being borrowed/stolen. If PES is to have a meaningful future in this generation, it will surely need to blatantly steal the new FIFA’s best ideas. New FIFA has ‘borrowed’ enough of PES’s clothes. Time to return the compliment.

Aston Villa away. After I started the season like a rocket, and grew concerned about PES2008 becoming too easy for me, the CPU teams have just stepped things up a gear. I’ve taken a couple of sound beatings. I not only want and need to put one over on the PES version of the Villa, I also would like the 3 points, thank you very much.

In real life, the rivalry between Coventry City and Aston Villa football clubs is mostly one-way. We care about beating them, and we used to beat them very rarely in the English top division. Villa don’t care about beating us, and they used to beat us a lot. There’s some kind of lesson in there somewhere.

In PES - the 2008 flavour, or any other - there’s a definite forlornness about the whole local rivalry thing. The FIFA series has all the real-life licenses, and has always modelled local rivalries particularly well. In PES, you more or less have to imagine it for yourself. This is something I have always done with gusto. Whenever I finally make it into the top division I always look through the calendar and make a mental note of the two league fixtures against the Villa. Then I start preparing for them a couple of games in advance, resting key players, and licking my lips…

I made a fantastic start. Literally, the stuff of fantasy: two quickfire goals in the first 10 minutes from that man Schwarz. I was punching the air here in my sad little room.2-0 up, then, and almost guaranteed to be in a winning position. You’d think. But this is PES2008.

All matches for me at the moment in Master League seem to follow the same pattern. Taking a 2-0 lead is almost guaranteed to invite a response from the CPU in the form of a cheeky goal that it seems you are powerless to prevent. Aston Villa got themselves a corner, and I braced for the inevitable.

Recently. I have started to be able to defend corners with about 95% success. I had been automatically trying to defend them using the method from the last couple of PESes. In PES5 all you had to do was stand a defender in the sweet spot on the corner of the six-yard box; in PES6, the sweet spot was a yard or two deeper.

I got hold of my defenders in the box and dragged them over to stand on the Villa strikers’ toes. Over came the corner. The ball was dropping directly at my defender, Mattsson. There was no way the Villa attacker - who was not only smaller than Mattsson, but standing behind him relative to the ball’s approach vector (bear with me here) - was ever going to get his head on that ball, right? Right?

I waited until the appropriate time, and then pressed for Mattsson to make the kind of routine clearance that I have been routinely performing for many dozens of games now, ever since I discovered how to do it. Mattsson didn’t move, and somehow the ball went over his head, onto the Villa attacker’s forehead, and into the net.

1-2, and I would have fumed if I had any fumes left with which to fume. PES2008 has almost completely defumed me. Bless its little heart.

At this stage, things can go several ways. The CPU will maintain its supercharged drive forward to get a goal. What you need is another goal yourself, to kill the game off.

I got it. Again it came from Schwarz, completing his hat trick:

The game ended that way: 1-3. I was happy to have bested my virtual local rival on their own patch. I resisted the urge to soil a sheet of toilet paper and send it to the real Villa Park along with a rude note (again). I’m way past that.

I moved onto the next games with increased confidence. It seemed I was through the bad patch. I beat Fulham 3-0 despite the CPU once again being in perma-God Mode. I’ve discovered - or rediscovered - how to cope with God Mode in PES2008. It’s simple: remember that you’re playing a game, not locked in a life-or-death struggle for your family honour. When you feel your fingers cramping up as though you’re trying to strangle the joypad, you’re doing it wrong. Pause the game for a few moments, take literal and figurative deep breaths, and then resume.

I played the return leg of the Division 1 Cup tie against Spurs. It was at their ground, and it ended 1-1. It was a hard match but I held on to go through on the away goal. It’s my Cup and they’re not taking it off me.

The session concluded on a downbeat note with a mammoth encounter against Arsenal. It ended 3-2 to them after I had been 2-1 up at half time. They got the equaliser on 70 minutes from a penalty that I thought was a blatant dive. Referee!

I quite like the inclusion of diving in PES2008. Like it or not, diving is a feature of the real-life game. Any football video game that aspires to represent the sport must include diving, however unsporting it is. Q.E.D. What’s next, then, an objector might, er, object. Hooliganism? Point taken, but diving in PES2008 enriches the game, in my opinion. It leads to contentious moments, exciting scenarios, fair and unfair outcomes. I’ve tried it myself, off and on, with almost zero success. But it’s still early days.

When Arsenal clicked into their turbo mode in search of a winning goal I started to ignore my own advice. I could hear the joypad creaking under the pressure, but I never let up. I was clamping again: pressing R1+X+Square. Will I never learn? Clamping doesn’t actually benefit you a great deal. All it does is drag players out of position, tires them, and send them into a virtual panic. While your players are hurling themselves pell-mell all over the place, the CPU delves into its box of tricks, with this kind of result:

Oh, the pain.

Going into the mid-season negotiations period, I’m still holding steady in fourth place, but Chelsea at the top of the table are starting to pull away. They’re 7 points clear of Man Utd in second place, and 12 points clear of me. It’ll be difficult for anyone to catch them now. I wasn’t expecting to challenge for the title this season, though, so I’m not disappointed. What I wanted from this season was to avoid relegation. I will avoid it, I think, so a top-6 finish and qualification for next season’s European Cup is now my new ‘bonus’ target.

Another bonus: at the moment, Schwarz is second in the top scorers’ league. He has 12 goals. Rooney, in first place, has 15. I’d like to get Schwarz to the top of this list by season’s end. He deserves it.

I’ve always said to anyone who will listen (i.e., to no one) that the greatest PES striker ever was PES5’s Dennis Bergkamp (after he had regenerated, of course). Schwarz in PES2008 isn’t quite there yet. But he’s a contender.