PES Chronicles

The mid-season transfer window in season 12 of my Master League career in PES2010 has come and gone. I had two big AI offers on the table for two of my strikers. Tanaka, my 78-rated journeyman Japanese forward, had been on the transfer list since before the start of the season. Only one offer was submitted for him: £24.3m. He’s a slow WF/SS/CF hybrid who barely gets a game for me nowadays. What was I going to do?

Also on the transfer list was Sazi. At one time he was my main man, the apple of my eye, the essential striker whom I thought I needed to win any match. But he’s been seriously lacking in recent seasons, particularly since I paid £2m to equip him with two extra skill cards. Ever since that time, he’s been a shadow of the player he was before. I have serious doubts as to whether the ability to purchase sill cards for players is a worthwhile feaure of the game, or if it’s just glorified makework.

I would have accepted an offer for Sazi of £4m. The offer that came in for him was £16m. So I would easily recoup the money spent on useless skill cards, and then some.

It was a traditional ML no-brainer on both counts. £42,000,000 for two players who hardly get a game for me nowadays. I sold both of them without any regrets.

As for transfers in, I only managed to bring in one new player. I did keep trying for Raul, Scholes, plus a few other genuinely first-class ML performers, but none of them would come to me. I’m pretty sure my team reputation is still below a certain threshold. There was no new talent worth harvesting in my Youth team.

The one player I brought in was a young goalkeeper, a 75-rated Gianluigi Buffon. I spent £1.5m on him. Currently 18 years old, he’ll take over as my #1 keeper in a season or two. I’ve got no problems with Zuberbuhler at the moment—in fact he’s been pretty impressive. I’m looking a good way ahead to the future, is all. I’ll try to sell Fatecha, now my 3rd-choice keeper, at the end of the season.

This lack of buying means that I am very rich indeed. I’ve got about £60m in the bank. The days of struggling to pay my bills at the end of a season are a long, long way behind me. I’ll start spending it all in the next transfer window—if the game will let me.

It occurs to me that I’ve not yet posted an actual, proper First XI during this whole career so far. Every squad image I’ve shown has been jumbled up. So here it is. The First XI seen in the latest squad list on the left currently is my preferred selection, game after game, as long as all are available. With this line-up I can give any team in the ML world a good game—usually…

After a slump in league form I went on a run of 6 wins out of 7. I am now back up to 2nd place, level on points with Man Utd and just trailing on goal difference. In the current crop of league games I had a thrilling clash with Spurs that I won 2-1 with a fine late winner from Zaki.

Sadly, I have been knocked out of the Champions League in the first knockout round for the second season in a row. It’s the same old story. Once I get to the knockout stages, the difficulty seems to go up another notch or two. Last season I was taken apart by Sochaux. This season my quarter final nemesis was in the form of RC Lens.

In PES2010 such teams as Sochaux and Lens are better than 2009 Barcelona and 1990s Milan and 1970 Brazil and late 70s/early 80s Liverpool all put together and pumped full of amphetamines. I don’t know what it is. Obviously I’m a poor player, so that doesn’t help, but it seems to me that strange things happen in these games. The aggression is turned up to 11. The ‘tangle and snatch’ effect that constantly wrests possession away is turned up to 12. All in all I couldn’t live with them over the two legs. I lost the first leg at their ground 2-0, and I lost the second leg at mine 1-2. A feeble exit. I really will have to do better. A Treble may never happen at this rate.

So all I have left to go for now is the league title. With 14 matches left, I think I’ll do it.

For various reasons, I’ve broken with my settled tradition by restarting my Master League career in PES. This is the first time ever that I’ve done this. I’ve been playing Master League since 2002. In all that time I’ve sometimes ‘completed’ careers and gone on to start new ones, but I’ve never abandoned my very first one of the PES-year. I had my reasons for jumping ship this time, and they were good ones.

One of the major reasons was that I originally bungled my league setup. I’d foolishly chosen to play in Division 2 with made-up Konami teams. It was amusing at first, but the novelty soon wore off. The other teams might as well all have been called ABCDEFGH UNITED. There was no sense of occasion to any match. In setting up the new career I took great pleasure in hand-picking the teams that would make up my new Division 2. I included one of those made-up Konami teams, just for the hell of it.

I took my time over the formation and First XI. Once gain I’d promoted Oscar and Schwarz from the Youth team, and there was a starting place for both. (I’ll be more careful with Oscar this time around.) The formation is a slightly tweaked 4-4-2 with wingers slightly pushed forward and the defenders slightly withdrawn—a FIFA-style 4-4-2, dare I say it. If the aborted career taught me anything it’s that I’m nowhere near ready to play 4-3-3 just yet.

Game 1 was against Dinamo Zagreb. I was in for a nasty surprise before kick-off. The game froze on me and I had to restart the PS3. Again. This does keep happening to me with PES2010. Not very often, but often enough for it to be annoying. If it’s going to happen, it always happens in the first game of a session, and always at the same place—when the players are lining up in the tunnel, as pictured.

I hear this is a recurrent problem on the PS3, but possibly just on some models. Mine is a repaired 60GB original. I’ve taken to pressing START immediately to make the game skip loading the intro scenes, and that seems to have alleviated the problem.

I won that first match against Dinamo Zagreb. It was a really good match, one of the best kind of Default matches, with all players fit and in form. I played really well, and had several epiphanies abut the PES2010 gameplay that I’ll talk about next week. (It’s all about the passing and the players.)

Game 1 with a new Master League team often goes suspiciously well, so I’m not planning the open-topped bus parade just yet. Gutierrez—the new outstanding hero of Master League, IMO—got the only goal.

And things continued pretty well. I’ve started this new career a lot better than I started (or finished) my last one. Scoring goals is still a problem, but I’m defending better. I’m in 10th position after 7 matches.

I’ve learned a harsh lesson from the financial fiasco that helped bring down the curtain on my last career. I’ll be very careful about bringing in any new players until I know exactly where I stand. The new scouting/negotiation system means I have the leisure to spend the whole season looking at players and making offers. I’ll take my time.

In other news, there’s a surprising new hero to stand alongside Gutierrez up front. That player’s name is… Castolo. Regular readers will know that I have no time and no patience whatsoever for the stubborn myth of Castolo. But when Ordaz was out injured for several weeks, I picked Castolo. He was the scorer of my other goal so far, and generally he’s handled pretty well out there on the pitch. If he wasn’t 34 years old he’d almost be a prospect. I’ll still sell him at the first opporutnity I get, but I might look out for him as a Regen and see what new stories I can create with him in the future.

Assuming, of course, that I’m still playing this career by that stage. I think I will be.

Okay, this is getting scary. I’ve been playing PES2009 solidly for three days now and I’m loving every moment of it. I might even play it for the next week, or at any rate until I feel the tug of FIFA09 again.

There are still huge shortcomings to this game that are all too apparent in this era of new-style FIFA. And yet, and yet… Maybe it’s time to stop resenting PES2009 for merely being ‘adequate’. Maybe it’s actually pretty good. It feels nice to be positive about PES again, probably for the first time in a year. However long or short a time this feeling lasts for, I’m glad it’s here. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost…

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I’ve gone on with my Master League career as Coventry City (using the Default players) and started my second season. I’ve moved down a difficulty level, from Top Player to Professional, just for this season (not that it’s helped me). The damn dog is back in the Master League menus. It appears to be a Scotch Terrier this year. What was it last year? I can’t remember.

My transfer activity in this career has been quite intensive. In PESes past I don’t remember being able to pick up quite so many new players as I’ve already picked up in this career. Even though I’ve been rubbish on the pitch and didn’t amass many points to spend, I still managed to pick up a  fair few players from the Youth and Unbelonging lists.

VAN DER VELDEN (pictured left)—An average player really, but still better than any Default player. Most notable for his strangely long head (left). The picture has not been doctored in any way. And people talk about FIFA’s zombies…

SCHONE—Just average again, but again he’s better than any Default player, so he was well worth getting. These are the kinds of players that have to be acquired in order to start picking up results.

MAI LUNGI—a nice find in the Unbelonging list. A veteran 28-year-old striker, tall and strong, with a good rasping shot on him. I’ve already scored a spectacular goal with him late on in a match that had me punching the air and grinning like an idiot.

DIETRICH—an early gem of a find in the Youth list. Can play DMF or AMF and already has decent stats for an 18-year-old. His development graph (right) is only above-average-looking, really, but I hope to ‘over-develop’ him in the same way I did Bradley last year. He’ll do until I can get Bradley or someone like him, put it that way.

KOBAYASHI—a bog-standard left-sided defender, can play SB or CB.  A placeholder. Better than the Defaults, but destined to be traded for a better player as soon as possible.

TRAORE—I got him from the Youth list mainly because of his name, but he’s not either of the more famous Traores from what I can tell. Still early days though.

ANTONINI—a decent right-back who can also play SMF. I off-loaded Giersen as soon as I got him.

JACKSON—a solid CB, one of the few highlights of last year’s ML. Another Youth player.

That’s a lot of new players for a struggling team at the start of season 2. I know… The underlying logistics of Master League have evidently been tweaked, enabling you to get this many players even with almost no funds.

I had to release a good few of the Defaults to make room for these players in my squad, and also get the wage budget down. I didn’t keep precise notes—mainly because I was enjoying myself too much playing PES2009, and I didn’t want to stop and break the ’spell’. I’ve still got most of the Default lot but the likes of Stein, Huylens, and Ceciu have all been released. I scraped through the last week of negotations with just 230 points to spare.

Here’s my current First XI:

I have to continue a tradition from last year by stating that my First XI is very, very provisional. None of my players are capable of playing two matches in a row.

So—I’m playing PES2009. I’m posting my squad lists and my First XI. What gives?

I like the gameplay. It’s not as good as FIFA09’s gameplay, but it’s still good. PES2009 also encourages patient, engrossing gameplay to a surprising degree.

Here’s a key goal I scored in a recent game. It’s been a bad start to the season. I’ve yet to win a league game after 5 games. But in the Cup I beat West Brom 1-0, a hard-fought and satisying victory. The clip doesn’t do full justice to the rhythms of play and the patience shown. This goal was the culmination of an exquisite passage of play (I’m praising PES2009 here, not myself) that saw me keep possession, lose it, get it back, keep it again, and then patiently wait for an opening to show itself. Here’s the last 15% or so of the sequence in question:

That stalwart of Master League DODO applies the finish—a lovely 25-yard curler into the top corner. What I loved about his goal was that it was my first proper goal scored from the ‘DMF hole’, as I call it—i.e. the slightly withdrawn, long-shot-friendly position that the DMF slots into in my beloved 4-3-3 formation.

PES’s assisted shooting mechanic has a surprising amount of subtlety, but it can still feel unsophisticated after experiencing the depth of FIFA’s semi-manual shooting. The weak, flapping goalkeepers are a persistent worry for the long-term. And I’ve never seen passing as unreliable in PES as it is in PES2009. Sometimes a pass just doesn’t go where you direct it to, for no real reason that I can see—something I’ll no doubt be moaning talking about in detail next week.

But I’m holding off on the detailed criticisms for now. These last few days have been overwhelmingly positive. I’m actually waking up in the morning and looking forward to playing PES again.

My mid-season 2021 signings were: Frank Lampard, John Terry, and Ronaldo. I’ll deal with them in reverse order.

My new Ronaldo is, of course, the currently-chunky Brazilian one. (I’d like to get the other one, the little Portuguese one, at some point, but he’s yet to retire and Regenerate.) My new Ronaldo is as slender as a gazelle and, you know what, he’s pretty damn good. People tend to forget that the real-life Ronaldo, at his peak, was arguably the most talented footballer since Maradona. The last time I had Ronaldo in PES was in PES5, when he was one of my top strikers, as he darn well should have been. I’m expecting him to be pretty special in this one too, although it’ll probably be a few season before I see the best of him. He’s still very young, only 21 years old.

John Terry is a player whom I don’t much like in real life. Before any Chelsea fans get on their high horses, hear me out. I acknowledge his considerable talents as a defender. It’s as an all-round footballer in the game that I have issues with him. John Terry is one of the most obnoxious characters in football right now. Who is it who chases after referees and shrieks at them the most? Yep, JT and his posse.

And another thing. John Terry was one of the so-called ‘golden generation’ of English footballers who disastrously flopped at the 2006 World Cup. Despite what England’s tabloid newspapers might have you believe, nobody in England really believed that England would go to Germany and come home with the World Cup. No.

All that I and everybody I know hoped for was that the team would perform well, play some exciting football, give us something to cheer, and perhaps get to the semi-final at best. Certainly England had the players to compete and give a good account of themselves. What we got instead was, in my opinion, the dullest, most dour performances from England at a major tournament that I can ever remember. John Terry was by no means the sole culprit—am I the only one who can tell that Steven Gerrard just doesn’t like playing for England?

But, yeah… Whatever. Rant over. John Terry is a dubious real-life character, but a fine PES player whenever I’ve had the opportunity to play with him. Maldini is in his early 30s now and before too long I’ll need another commanding CB to fill his boots.

And so to Frank Lampard. Yet another much-vaunted player who comprehensively failed to perform in Germany in 2006. And it could be argued that he was always only a flash in the pan a few seasons ago. Was it in 2004 that Lampard was being touted as the best midfielder in the world? It seems like a very long time ago now, whenever it was.

But, like Terry, Frank Lampard is a great PES player. He plays in several positions in midfield, is a great tackler, has got great energy, and of course that most important skill for a PES midfielder—Middle Shooting. I look forward to scoring several long-range sizzlers every season with Lampard.

I couldn’t bring in 3 new players without getting rid of some. I offloaded three existing members of my squad in the various deals that brought in the new boys. The players who went were Fernandez, Scholes and Khumalo.

Fernandez was a great player for my team during those often-tricky ‘middle years’ between the Default squad and my current near-dominance of the league. But alas, he’s now ageing and ripe for the chop. I had high hopes for Scholes but he’s just taking too long to develop—I might buy him back in a few seasons’ time when he’s at his peak. As for Khumalo, he was good but not great for me, and he formed part of the deal that prised Ronaldo away from his CPU club. I doubt I’d have got him otherwise.