This time between the release of FIFA09 and the release of PES2009 feels pretty damn peculiar to me. For the many PES fans who are still PES through-and-through—”we don’t need no stinkin’ FEEFA”—it’s just the annual agony of impatience for the new PES game. I remember how that feels and I still feel it myself, in my own way.

The high quality of FIFA09 asks me a question that I don’t particularly want to answer. I want to avoid this question. I want to run away from it and hide from it and not have to face up to it, ever.

For a year now, it’s been strange to be a PES fan who’s attracted to the new-style FIFA. I feel curiously adrift, and somehow guilty, as if I’ve been bewitched somehow and I should know how to undo the spell and get back to liking the real football game, PES. But I’ve been so thoroughly bewitched, it seems, that I don’t know I’m bewitched, and I think my new regard for FIFA is natural and proper, and it’s PES that’s in the wrong, and all the rabid ‘one nation’ PES fans who are in the wrong and simply BLIND to the obvious truth, not me, not me, not me….

Deep breath. Short version. Could this be the year that I finally give myself totally to the other game—to FIFA? After all these years, has it finally come to this? Is it le crunch?

The coming few weeks will see things go one of several possible ways:

• Status Quo—I continue as a PES player, with frequent side-visits to FIFA. Chance of this happening: very unlikely. PES2009 may be good, but I doubt it will be great. Even if it is, FIFA09 is great too. I doubt it’ll play second fiddle this year.
• Half-and-half—I focus on PES2009 and FIFA09 in roughly equal measures. Chance of it happening: If PES2009 is in any way a good game, this is the most likely outcome.
• Total reversal from last year—I play FIFA09 most of the time, and only make occasional sorties into PES2009-land. It still amazes me that this kind of scenario is even thinkable. Let alone possible, which it is. If it does happen, the blog name would have to change. I’ve already tested how it might look (see fig.1 below).
• Total conversion to FIFA—For this to happen, PES2009  would have to completely disgust me for some reason. Chances: very unlikely but scarily possible. See below.

I had a traumatic experience in midweek. After several days’ intense play of FIFA09, I played a few games of PES2008 on my PSP. And I shouldn’t have. The sheer speed of the game, for one thing. No. Never again can I ever play a football game as fast as old-style PES. Maybe occasionally, for ‘fun’, but never day-in, day-out.

But when playing PES2008 I felt pretty dismayed about the gameplay. It struck me as being crude. This for me was most shocking, as I’ve always been vocal about admiring PES’s core gameplay. This… was an interesting couple of games, put it that way.

I had to have a few goes on the PES2009 demo, just to calm my jangled nerves. I felt slightly reassured. PES2009 boasts classic PES gameplay, but slowed down and tarted up for the PS3. (A year late, but let’s not start that again now.) And who knows how the next months will play out. I read today that the CPU teams in FIFA09 seem to be unable to score from outside the box. If true, then that’s a big demerit for FIFA. I’ve already had the PES2009 CPU score a 25-yarder against me in the demo. And PES2009 will have Master League… So who knows which way the wind will blow.

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FINALLY, tomorrow (Sunday) will be a day of rest for the blog. No post. I’m not going to take every Sunday off, just most of them. Last season I posted every day, seven days a week, without fail. Well, this year that has got to change. For various reasons the Sunday post was always the one I struggled most to get done in time. It’ll be good to have that pressure taken off me, and have some breathing space.

On Monday I’ll take one more look at my FIFA09 progress. Then from Tuesday I’ll switch focus to PES2009 in the build-up to release day. How long that focus stays on PES2009 all depends.

I think I’ve identified the problem. Yesterday I said I was going back to my PS3 Manager Mode career with Coventry City. The one I started on the Xbox360 with Atletico Madrid was proving too tough for me and I didn’t know why. Yes, there are better teams in the top Spanish league than there are in the English Coca Cola Championship. But it shouldn’t be so tough—on the same difficulty and control settings—that I was in danger of getting fired by Atletico. Should it?

Of course, the answer turned out to be simple. I was trying too hard to score a ’showbiz’ goal, as Mark Hughes used to call them (and often score them) back in his playing days. I needed to calm down and just try to get bread and butter goals, and pick up points and move up the table, and let the showbiz goals take care of themselves. Let them come naturally in the fullness of time.

Which is what I did. Results came immediately. My first game ended 2-0 to me. I drew the next game 2-2, but should have won it (see below). And I won the third game of the session 1-0. Here’s one of those bread and butter goals, which came about after I switched to a wide formation in the tactics editor. I wasn’t getting this kind of space until I did:

Total bread and butter, that goal. After my troubles of yesterday I felt as happy with it as I would have done with a 40-yard screamer. Well, almost as happy.

I did score a slightly prettier goal during this session. I uploaded it, but I made the mistake of submitting it to EA Sportsworld in slow-motion, and somehow it snipped off the part where the actual goal was scored. So there’s no point showing it here. For the record, it was a delicious outside-of-the-boot finish from Maxi Rodriguez, scored from a long, pretty aimless cross that’d bobbled to him across the penalty box. It went in off the far post.

I have stopped using YouTube to stream goals to this blog, possibly for good. The new site—LiveLeak—allows you to directly upload .flv video files (YouTube doesn’t), and there is little or no loss of quality. I’d never heard of this LiveLeak place until I saw them mentioned on Evo-Web the other day. I hope they’re not one of these fly-by-night setups and I can use them for a good long while.

So. I’d been trying to score stunners, long-range screamers that I could show off here, rather than just concentrating on winning the match, which is what real football is all about. And can there be any doubt that FIFA09, for better or worse, is all about real football? I don’t think there’s an argument left to be had.

There’s got to be a downside. In the middle of my three games I came up against… Osasuna.

Regular readers will recall that Osasuna were my bogey team in the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. (A very good PES game and one I will return to at some point this year). Back then it seemed that every season they were primed to frustrate me no matter what I did or how well I played. Surely the hoodoo couldn’t translate into a whole new ball game?

It bloody well could translate. I went into a 2-0 lead against them and I thought: that’s it, I’ve cracked it at last… Naturally, this heralded an Osasuna fightback. I’ve noticed in FIFA09 that there is a kind of momentum (in Seabass’ dread phrase) that the CPU can build up when it’s behind. The possession bonus that it enjoyed in FIFA08 is still in 09, only it’s a bit more subtle I think. You don’t see the CPU players twisty-turning on the wings to the same infuriating degree, but they still have the old possession ‘magic’ when they need it.

Of course, it’s up to the human player to defend better. With discipline and patience. I didn’t.

Osasuna came back to draw 2-2. Of course they did. I threw everything at them in the last minutes, aching for the winner. I was horribly frustrated. Bloody Osasuna! They’d only gone and done me again. I’ll be watching out for the return fixture later in the season.

I started my first Manager Mode career too quickly, never mind my second. I should have waited a few more days before starting with Coventry City on the PS3; I should have waited a few weeks before daring to start one on the Xbox360 with Atletico Madrid. Or maybe I just shouldn’t have tried to play a 360 Manager Mode career in parallel with a PS3 one. I don’t know.

The other night I played a game online using Atletico Madrid and I really liked their style. They’re Spanish, and I’ve never played Manager Mode in Spain. They had an attractive stripey kit—bonus.

Hey, I know, I’ll pick them as my Xbox360 Manager Mode team, I thought. I’d stick with my PS3 settings: Professional difficulty, with semi-manual passing and shooting and crossing. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh dear. I’ve played 6 games. I’ve drawn 5 and lost 1. I’ve only scored a few goals. My job security rating is down to the 40% mark. If I don’t win soon, I’ll be in danger of the sack.

When people criticise FIFA09 as being tiresome, thankless, dull, too realistic, and all the rest of it, they surely have games like these in mind. I think I had one shot on goal in one of the games. In the others I had a few more shots, but they were mainly typical of my ambition right now: vastly in excess of my ability. Somewhere in virtual reality, some of those shots are probably still rising. I still haven’t got a great FIFA09 goal to show off.

For all the grim struggles of those games, I really enjoyed playing them. My idea of fun is not endless 5-4 scorelines and festivals of long-range shooting. I do love me some long-range shooting, but I also love pizza and I couldn’t stand to eat pizza every day.

I was considering dropping down a difficulty level on the 360, to Semi-Pro, just to get some confidence back. To hell with the humiliation of it all. But I’m sure my problem is just one of adjustment. I did start this career on the Xbox rather suddenly. I was still finding my feet on the PS3. What I think I’ll do is go back and play my Coventry City career some more. Not that I’m doing much better there…

After a pretty good start with Coventry City—the through-ball bug notwithstanding—I’m still in the top half of the table. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how useful my Coventry strikers feel. The likes of Eastwood and Mifsud, for me, feel more dangerous in front of goal than Atletico’s Forlan and Pongolle et al. Curious.