At the mid-season stage I’m still winning, and winning well. The difference between my performances this season and my performances in the last two seasons is that I’m defending with greater concentration and seriousness.

I rarely concede goals now, compared to times past. I stand off, I harry, I snuff out dangerous moves. I refrain from practising my old vice of diving in all over the place, conceding free kicks, getting yellow and red cards, and often simply enabling the CPU players to evade my clumsy tackles and race through on goal.

As a result of all this disciplined defending, my league record at the moment is great, almost as good as it possibly could be. Played 15, won 14, drawn 1, lost 0. For me, that’s pretty damn good. I’m unbeaten and I’ve only conceded 7 goals. True perfection would be to win every game and concede no goals, but that could never happen. I don’t think it could, anyway.

No doubt there are some out there who are good enough, potentially, to deny the CPU teams any goals throughout an entire league season. But I believe there are some goals that can never be prevented. Over the course of a season the game itself makes sure that at least a few goals are conceded and at least a few points are dropped.

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Just before the mid-season negotiations I played the first leg of the Division 1 Cup quarter-final. There’s no such thing as a routine game for me while I’m still going for my major target of a Treble (League, Cup, European Cup).

My opponents were Heracles Almelo. At times they’re a tricky team to play against; at other times I’ve found them easy prey. How they would be in this game depended very much, I suspected, on whatever algorithms deep in the bowels of PES2008’s programming code are responsible for the character of the CPU teams from game to game.

Unfortunately for me, Heracles were in TRICKY mode. I was at home, so my primary strategy lay in not conceding any goals. Any goals I scored myself would be a bonus. As bad luck would have it I spent the whole game defending against a very spirited, very attack-minded opposition.

How my goal survived intact I’ll never know. The game finished 0-0. Come the away leg I’ll be the strong favourite, as I’ll only have to score once and the tie will effectively be over.

(Incidentally, it has struck me for several years now that the away goals rule in football is far, far too overpowered. It produces horrendously skewed games and results. Too many times a mediocre away team will fluke a goal and effectively win the tie with it. I think the footballing argument for the away goals rule is false. I have a conspiracy theory about the away goals rule. It was introduced by the authorities at a time when television was just starting to show big interest—and hence BIG $$$—in screening live football matches. Now, one thing that television cannot abide is any disruption to its schedules, and games that run into extra time are notorious for doing this (leading to The 10 O’clock News coming on at midnight, for example). The away goals rule effectively reduced by about 90% the amount of two-legged matches whose second legs went into extra time. I’ve just plucked that % figure out of the air, so I have no idea how accurate it is, but it certainly feels accurate.)

Here in the exact middle of the season I’m 13 points clear in the League. I’m nicely positioned in the two Cups. I believe that the Treble is a strong possibility (due to the ‘one bad game’ factor in the Cups, the Treble can never be a certainty). I’m unbeaten, and I’ve only conceded 7 goals. This is all looking good. No getting sloppy, now…

In Master League you often end up playing the same teams back-to-back in the League and in European groups. It’s one of the many consequences of the Master League world being so small. Master League is in urgent need of an overhaul. I think we need more than just four leagues with two divisions in each. We need about twenty leagues with four divisions each, in my opinion. It needs to be as close to the real world as possible. Yes, I’ll say it, it needs to be as close to FIFA’s Manager Mode setup as possible. I’d like to be able to play a Pro Evo career in that kind of wider footballing world.

Real Madrid are in my European Championships group. They’re also one of my main rivals in the league. They’re not a great team in my ML and never have been, but they’re still no pushovers. They can still give me a good game.

In our league encounter they took the lead, a little luckily. I equalised soon afterward (which is always nice), albeit rather luckily with a Schwarz header that first went down into the ground then looped up and over the keeper into the net. 1-1 it stayed from then on. I’d just accepted that it was going to end 1-1 when I had a chance with Schwarz. He was in the box and I was just about to pull the trigger when the CPU defender viciously scythed him down from behind. Not even Pro Evo could deny me such a clear-cut penalty, but the CPU defender got away with a yellow card. For me, that would have been red.

Andy Cole was my penalty kicker. I felt beforehand that I’d miss the penalty whoever took it, so I decided I might as well leave Andy Cole to carry the can. Penalties in PES have always been totally random. They have no actual skill element that I have ever been able to detect. If anybody out there believes otherwise—or, preferably, knows otherwise—then I’d love to hear from them. I did no more than flick the analogue stick toward the right of the net, and tap shoot. Andy Cole ran up and blasted the ball two yards over the crossbar, and the match ended 1-1.

Then Real Madrid beat me in the first game of our European Championship group. The match started pretty tamely, but I had Del Piero sent off for a nothing foul in midfield. The CPU player was miles from my goal with my entire defence in the way. My tackle with Del Piero was a slightly mistimed one from the side, the kind of tackle that’s a yellow card at most. But on this occasion it was a straight red card.

Despite the setback I took the lead. That often happens when I play with 10 men (and sometimes with less than 10 men). I play superbly and wonder how I can ever be beaten. But on this occasion, it was not to be. I admit to letting my concentration slip and allowing a soft equaliser to go in before half time. Then, in the second half, Real got their winner. I couldn’t come back, and thus I lost the opening group game. I hate doing that.

In the league I finally came up against Deportivo la Coruna. I’ve had a great start to the league season, and so have they. I beat them 3-2 with two good goals from Henry—his first for me—one of them a true poacher’s goal after a very strange short back-pass from a CPU defender to the goalkeeper.

For my second game in Europe I brought all my concentration to bear. Another defeat was unthinkable. I’m going for a Treble this season.

Benfica, another old ‘friend’ of mine from this ML career, were next. I scored early and hung on until the end to win 1-0. I had to really dig in and withstand some ridiculous pressure and manipulation of the game. I absolutely hate in PES2008 how your players are often forced to run on rails with the ball at their feet and carry the ball over the line for throw-ins and corners to the CPU. Before anyone mentions super-cancel, it doesn’t arrest the progress of my players’ running on rails. It’s a definite feature of the programming this year, just one of the myriad ways in which the AI is granted an advantage in times of trouble.

Never mind. It hadn’t cost me this time and I’d got the win I wanted. It makes the group table look a little healthier, although I hope that first-game defeat doesn’t come back to haunt me further down the line.

Yesterday a rumour appeared on WENB to the effect that PES2009 might—just might—be released on 17th October, which would be earlier than usual this year. We’re so used by now to the game appearing on a late Friday in October, that a release date of either 24/10 or 31/10 was pretty much assumed to be the case. Assumed by me, anyway. But if there’s any substance to the rumour, then we may well be looking at a UK release date of 17/10.

Last year, I started using GAME.co.uk for all my big pre-release pre-orders. I’d heard that they commonly sent out games in time to arrive at least a day early, and often two days early. Sure enough, I received FIFA08 from them two days before it landed on retail shelves. The same thing happened with PES2008.

The only time they’ve let me down was for Metal Gear Solid 4, which had the cheek to arrive on the actual release date, not before. Huh. I wasn’t impressed. But I’ll be using GAME again this year for PES, and hoping for early delivery again. I’m not on any kind of affiliate whatchamacallit thing with them. I’m just highly recommending them as a probable way to get the game early, is all. If history is any guide, and the release-date rumour is true, then I could have PES2009 as early as 15/10, which is (I’ve just counted) 106 days away. Hurrah! (Or how do the internet kids put it? Woo-hoo? Woot? Something like that.)

I hope the rumour’s true and PES2009 does come out early. If anything, I think Konami should move heaven and earth (and then move heaven some more) to release the game at the end of September, never mind October. By mid-to-late October, football game fans will have had several weeks to bed down and get all smoochy with EA’s hotly-anticipated FIFA09. The whole reason EA settled on September for its annual release was to beat PES to the shelves and rack up the sales before the real football game arrived in town. Well, times have changed, and I think Konami know it. So would a PES2009 release date of, say, October 3rd be too much to hope for? Probably.

———————–

I’m still getting through the matches in my Master League career on PES2008. I’m at the start of season 2019 and top of the league on goal difference after 5 wins out of 5. My opponents in game 6 were my old enemy from the past, Valencia. I’m playing great and confidence is high. When you play PES with maximum confidence, I’ve noticed, almost nothing can get in your way. I hammered Valencia 3-0, taking particular pleasure in keeping a clean sheet.

One of my aims for this season is to concede less than 20 goals. I’ve been frustrated in recent seasons by the leakiness of my defence. I want to determine if it’s just me playing badly, or if the game absolutely must score some goals at certain times. The jury is still out on that one, really.

Six wins out of six, then, but I was still only top of the league on goal difference. Deportivo in second place had matched me win for win. They’ve got a nice little 100% record of their own going on there. My goal difference really is worth an extra point. It’s +23 after six games of a thirty-game season. Extrapolating to the end of the season, that’d leave me with a GD of +115. In theory. I’d love to get even half of that in practice.

This season I’ve rejigged my forward line, removing the talented Kim Cyun Hi from the starting role that he’d enjoyed for the past few years. What games he has played so far this season have been in place of Giggs whenever the latter has been unfit.

Playing a right-footed player on the left sometimes works, sometimes not. The best striker I’ve ever played with in PES was Dennis Bergkamp in PES5. He was a right-footer who ploughed a mean furrow on the left side of my front 3 across a dozen amazing seasons. (Some of that amazingness can be seen here and here.) Playing Kim Cyun Hi on the left up front seems to be his best position for me, crazily. He’s scored more goals for me so far this season than any other striker, and that’s even without playing in every game. I’m considering bringing Kim back at this position permanently, and moving Giggs back to midfield. I’ll see how the next few games unfold and then I’ll decide.

All things that have a beginning must come to an end. Winning runs in Pro Evo are no exception to this natural law, alas. Predictably, it wasn’t Barca or Real or any remotely ‘big’ team what dunnit. Real Mallorca held me to sticky 1-1 draw. I call it sticky because it was just one of those games where it seems your players run through treacle and are scared of the ball. I considered this game two points dropped, and so did the league table. Deportivo won their corresponding fixture to overtake me at the top. They won’t last long.