Season 2020 in my Master League career saw me get off to my best-ever start with eight wins from eight games. Then I drew a game, against Real Betis of all teams. Why can it never be a Valencia, a Barca, or a Real Madrid that brings swashbuckling winning runs to an end? Why does it always have to be the equivalent of Bolton Wanderers?

Sheesh. Anyway, I recovered from the draw to beat Mallorca 3-0 in my next game, albeit after a very cagey opening. And then the Division 1 Cup got underway. My opponents were Deportivo la Coruna—not as easy as I would have liked, but not all that hard either. The first leg was at home, just the way I like it. The strategy is always not to concede an away goal, and score as many as possible myself. Well, no goals at all were scored. It ended 0-0. That’ll make the second leg a bit more interesting, although I’m the strong favourite.

Back in the league I racked up more wins. I hope I’m not talking out of turn here, but I feel now that I’m unstoppable in the League Championship competition. I’ve never had that feeling before in PES2008 ML so far. I feel that I will win the League title every season from now on, and that no one and nothing can stop me.

The two Cups are a different matter. You can never legislate against the ‘one bad game’ syndrome, whether it’s your fault, or the CPU getting up to its shenanigans, or both. Thus, you can never bank on progressing in the Cups. In the League, after a certain stage of your acquaintance with the game (which I passed a season or two ago), you’re virtually guaranteed to win the title. Having the occasional bad game or two doesn’t matter so much in the league.

I hope these words don’t come back to haunt me. Actually, part of me hopes that they do come back to haunt me… Because if they do, it’ll mean there’s life in the League title race yet. It all remains to be seen.

In the European Cup, the group action got underway. I’m in a group with AC Milan, Galatasaray, and Livorno. I’ve met them all at various points of this career. Only the sight of Galatasaray troubles me even slightly. I think the other two teams are weak and I should beat them easily and qualify out of the group without any trouble at all. Wow—today I’m really setting myself up for a big fall in the future…

AC Milan were the first opponents, and I found them surprisingly a lot better than they were the last time I met them in Europe. It was tight for most of the match and looking like a 0-0. I think that in most of my seasons so far, that’s how it would have ended. But I’m made of slightly sterner stuff lately…

After a pretty dour 70 minutes I scored a lovely first-time, curling daisycutter with Giggs. It was a peculiar type of goal unlike anything I can remember scoring yet in PES2008. I had the ball with Dos Santos on the halfway line, and played a through-ball down the centre of the pitch, into Giggs’ path as he ran across from the left wing. The replay makes it look as if he has more space than there actually was—with three Milan defenders rapidly bearing down on Giggs, it was now or never. My first-time shot is heading wide, but deliciously curls back, around the keeper’s dive:

With Giggs’ right foot too. Magic. Sadly, I allowed Milan to score their equaliser direct from their kick-off. Well, I say ‘allowed’ with reservations: it’d be more accurate to say that I watched helplessly as a sole Milan striker squirmed through four of my defenders to snatch himself a criminally undeserved goal. I was annoyed—to say the least—and raised my game to get the winning goal that I felt justice demanded. Five minutes from time, I got it. Giggs was on target again, this time with his head from a Yamada cross. It was enough to win the first European group game 2-1. It’s always nice to start with 3 points.

The end of season 2019 was one of my busiest and most eventful of recent years. Looking back to the start of this season, I had three aims: to win a traditional Treble of League, Cup, and European Cup; to go through the entire league season unbeaten; and to concede less than 20 goals while doing so.

The latter two aims fell apart fairly quickly. I lost a game and started shipping too many goals. That was okay—they were always bonus aims in any case, and I should have fun trying to achieve them in the future. Ah, but the Treble… The Treble was the Big One. I hadn’t won a Treble since season 2016, and that was my only one of this career. I badly wanted another one, and a better one—for many reasons I was dissatisfied with the 2016 Treble. Thankfully, I was more than on course for a more satisfactory Treble here in 2019.

I’ve already won the Division 1 Cup. I’m in the European Cup final. I’ve spent the whole season on top of the league. After I won league game 26, my players started running around like maniacs and celebrating, and I thought that was it, that I’d won the League. But no—the game took me straight back to the main ML menu without a trophy presentation scene. What was going on?

I discovered that with three games left I was 9 points ahead of Valencia, albeit with a ridiculously superior goal difference. Mathematically, they could still catch me if I lost all three remaining games and they won all of theirs by about 10-0 apiece. So why the signature Championship celebratory hugs among my team at the final whistle of the preceding game? Exactly the same thing happened last year. Obviously there’s a bug somewhere in the post-match ‘title-winning’ celebration scenes.

Before I had the chance to put the League to bed, there was the small matter of the European Cup final. For the sake of the Treble, this was the single most important game of the season. For the second European final running, my opponents were Lazio. They turned me over good and proper in the same match last season. I was wary of them, and I was right to be wary. Lazio were certainly not the attacking force they were last season, but the match was as dour and defensive as they come on PES2008 (generally an ultra-attacking game).

As time passed and the rare chances were being squandered by both sides, I feared the worst. Then in the 89th minute I broke clear with Kim Cyun Hi on the left. I’ve spent the whole season playing him very effectively out there on the left whenever Giggs can’t play for whatever reason, and it’s worked out very well. Kim is my top scorer in the league with 19 goals, which isn’t bad at all for a non-regular.

The goal was a relatively peculiar one for me in PES. The initial shot looks net-bound, but rebounds from the post, which usually means the CPU defence will scramble it away. However, Kim collects the rebound. Somehow I managed to retain enough composure not to instantly blast the ball over the bar, as would have happened if I’d jabbed at the Shoot button straightaway, as I usually would have done… Instead I ran Kim horizontally across the penalty area, ignored Schwarz’s timely run into space, and dinked the ball under the advancing keeper into the back of the net.

It was the Treble-winning goal. There was no time for Lazio to come back. They kicked off and had a token run down my left, but the final whistle went before they could do anything else. Yessss! That was the Treble in the bag, right there.

To make it official all I had to do was avoid being defeated 10-0 in each of my remaining league games. Okay, then. Game 27 was against my old friends Osasuna. Fittingly, I beat them 2-0 in an easy win. I say fittingly because for most of this Master League career they’ve been one of the poorest teams in the League and they’ve simultaneously been my bogey team. It’s always the way.

That was the Treble, officially, at last. Division 1 Cup, European Cup, and now the League—all had been won. It felt good. I allowed myself to relax and feel good about things, for a few moments.

I still had to play two last games in the League. I actually lost game 29, which was against Zaragoza—no doubt taking revenge against me for beating them in the D1 Cup final. But I won Game 30 against… I forget who it was against, actually, but I won it.

All of which left the final League table looking slightly less resounding in my favour than it perhaps should have been. I ended up winning the title by ‘only’ 4 points, when it feels as if I’ve had a superb, all-conquering season. I suppose the days of romping to league titles by margins of 10 or more points—which I used to do regularly in PESes of old—are gone for me.

The season had an amusing postscript. Well, I thought this was amusing: Osasuna were relegated from Division 1 at the end. That was a surprise. I tend not to follow what’s going on down in the basement. I had no idea they were in trouble. I won’t see my nemesis again for at least a season. The good news just keeps on coming…

And that, my friends, is that. I’ve finally won another Treble, in a manner that I deem to be more fitting than my only previous Treble. This is definitely my first proper Treble.

There’s still a lot to play for. I tend to always play one Master League career indefinitely, regardless of what happens. We’re still about two months from FIFA09, and about three months from PES2009. There’s still lots of PES2008 to be played before I can think about moving on to anything else. My current career goes on.

I still want to have the unbeaten League season that I’ve been trying for recently. And I want to concede less than 20 goals. And I want to win the league by more than 4 measly points. In the pre-season 2020 negotiations I really feel like getting some young players from the Youth list. I want to see what kind of team I can build when the inevitable time comes to start dismantling my current one. I’d better start planning for the future now. Anything is possible.

One of the long-term problems with Master League is that there are too few teams playing in too few leagues. I’ll go on record (again) and say that I hold Master League to be the greatest game mode ever created in the greatest game series ever created (so far…); but, as the years go by, even I am beginning to notice a certain fraying at the edges.

Take my latest three games as a case in point. It’s season 2019 and I’m going for treble of League, Cup, and European Cup. I qualified for the knockout stages of the latter competition by the skin of my teeth, scraping through with a 1-0 win in the final group fixture.

My opponents in the quarter-final were none other than the best AI team in my Master league—Valencia. But they were also my next opponents in the league. And then I played them straight afterward in the second leg of the quarter final…

Three games in a row against Valencia. Yes, it happens in real life—Liverpool vs Arsenal last season springs to mind—but then it’s a rarity, not a commonplace as it is in the current PES Master League setup. It shouldn’t be long before I do yet another Top 10 List Of Things That’d Be Just Great In PES2009. A bigger, better Master League, with a dozen leagues and hundreds of teams, is currently one of my most-wanted items.

The first leg of the European Cup quarter-final was on Valencia’s turf, just the way I like it. It gives me the chance to score a few away goals and make the second leg a formality. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, especially against Valencia (have I said how great they are in my ML yet?), it doesn’t always work out that way.

I took the lead. Quite early on in the first half, I scored this lovely goal with Giggs. It’s been a long while since I posted one of my beloved half-volleys on here. This one is worth it:

Perhaps the pitch-level view captures the essence of the goal a little better. I love how ruler-straight the ball flies:

I think I was entitled to get excited about that goal—and about going into a 0-1 lead away to Valencia in the European Cup quarter final. If I played it right, I could wrap up the tie (and arguably the tournament) right here in this match.

Sadly, I didn’t play it right. Valencia were in their best form. Whenever a CPU team really plays well, I can only complain about scripting if I want to be sulky and churlish (not a pretty combination). Valencia stormed back with three goals spread out over the rest of the match. I was still in the game at only 2-1 down right until the last ten minutes, when Valencia finally scored their third goal. I was disappointed, but at least I had that away goal. Sadly, it set up the worst possible scenario for me in the home leg. I’ll be trying for an early goal, and if I get it the CPU will see itself as losing the game (rather than winning the tie on aggregate), and God Mode will kick in automatically. Valencia playing on God Mode is one tough number.

In the league I no longer had an unbeaten run to protect, but I still had a healthy lead at the top of the table to defend. Valencia were as good—it seemed to me—as they’d just been in Europe. But maybe I was a little more focused here. I was very keen to increase the gap between us in the table. In the Europe game, I knew at the back of my mind that I had a whole second leg match to rescue things in, if need be. I didn’t have that luxury here. I won the league game 2-0 and it was pretty easy.

The second leg of the quarter final was also a lot easier. I won it 3-0, making the final aggregate score 4-3. When I took the lead the CPU predictably went into full-on God Mode overdrive, but I withstood the onslaught and snatched another goal before half time. That seemed to quieten things down. My third goal soon after the break more or less killed the game off. I came under some concerted pressure near the end, when a Valencia goal would have forced extra time. But the expected storm never came. I’m into the semi-final.