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.

My opponents in the quarter-final of the European Cup were Barcelona. In between the two legs of that tie, I played a crunch league game against Real Madrid. In most Master Leagues these three games taken together would have been among the hardest that I could ever (not) wish to have. But in this Master League, the fates have decreed that both Barca and Real are fairly average teams by the usual standards. They’re both still pretty good, but they’re nowhere near being the uber-opponents that they should be. It’s just the way things have gone.

At times I regret setting up this Master League in such haste back on March 1st. I do kind of wish I’d taken more time and at least included the English teams in a custom super-hard league. As much as I love my faux-Spanish league setup, I do miss playing against the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United. It would have been nice to at least have the possibility of meeting them in European competition. Back in March, I was pretty tired of the English teams after incessantly playing them (and effortlessly dribbling around them) on the version-that-must-not-be-named of PES2008. When I cracked open my PSP copy and set up an all-new Master League, I fancied a change.

Before the first leg of the European game against Barcelona, I implemented a change to my First XI that’s been in the wind for some time. Since I dropped the promising Kim Cyun Hi from my starting line-up a season or two ago, he’s been superb when filling in for Giggs up front on the left. This is despite Kim’s natural footedness being very much on the right.

It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that players can be as good (or even better) on their ‘wrong’ side in PES. Back in PES5, I played Bergkamp on his ‘wrong’ side, with staggering results. Kim Cyun Hi may be the same kind of player who’ll truly flourish for me on the ‘wrong’ side of the pitch. He was only ever competent for me in the middle and over on the right, not brilliant. I’m hoping he can be brilliant now he’s back in the regular first team.

All of which means that a place must be found for the mesmeric Giggs. In amongst all my good players, I only have about four or five gold-plated, undeniably brilliant players—Giggs is one of them. I decided to switch him back to the left-sided AMF role. He’s slightly more of a natural midfielder than he is a WF or CF. And he’s a better AMF than Burdner, who has been curiously anonymous for me so far. In PES6, Burdner was a star midfielder for me. Not so here. Not yet.

I’ve decided to stick with my 4-3-3, despite being strongly persuaded that an alternative formation might serve me better. The arguments for a 4-1-4-1, or a 4-2-4—or even my own demented brainchild, a 3-3-4—are variously compelling. But what can I say? I play PES every day, with hypnotic fervour, for a reason—it gives me more or less the same experience, day in, day out. I’m like a child who has to be told the same story in the same way, word for word, every day. Any departure is a cause for distress.

4-3-3 is an intrinsic part of my PES experience. I don’t know if I could stomach switching my main starting formation from my beloved, and familiar, 4-3-3. But never say never. The most I could do is to design an alternate formation and map it to a strategy button, and use it on the fly at selected moments in-game. I might do that in the off-season, when things are a mite less hectic.

——-

I won both legs of the Euro Cup tie against Barcelona 2-0 and it was pretty easy. I was barely challenged at all, which is actually quite rare for the latter stages of the Cups, I’ve found—even against an ‘average’ Barcelona. Or have I finally ‘aced’ PES2008, and will this be the norm for me from now on? I hope not. I still get enough awkward moments every season for me to know that the game still has a few nasty tricks up its virtual sleeve. Admittedly these tricks now can only come in the form of God Mode, a.k.a. good old scripting.

So that was me through to the semi-final of the European Cup. In the league game that formed the meat in the sandwich, I absolutely thumped Real Madrid 4-0.

Real Madrid are a mid-table team this year, and it shows. Their one bright spark is the almost peerless Kaiser, who usually torments me all game, but on this occasion he wasn’t playing.

So now I’m 13 points clear with 7 league games to go. Feasibly, I could have the title wrapped up with 4 games to go. I’d like that.

Yes, that’s a drearily predictable post title from your ever-punning PES blogger… (Although it’s not strictly a pun, but never mind.) I decided to go with it rather than the more traditional ‘pre-season 2020 negotiations’ title because a) I cannot resist wordplay, and b) actual negotiations were thin on the ground in this particular pre-season phase.

My existing squad has just won me a pretty emphatic Treble. There’s an old and venerable saying that goes something like: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

None of my players are over the age of 32. Even the few who are nearing that mark (Dos Santos, Komol, and a few others) are still amazingly gifted players who can do a job for me when necessary. In fact, they can do a bit more than just ‘a job’ for me—they’d be worthy of regular starting places if there weren’t other, younger players ahead of them. Thus I don’t need to ‘retire’ any players, and I don’t need any new players. So what exactly was I up to in this negotiations period? Why didn’t I simply press X seven times (or is it eight times?) and have done with it?

As I’ve mentioned before, I usually play one Master League career indefinitely for the entire PES year. That’s what I’m doing again this year. I’m not even vaguely tempted to restart and do it all over again with a new Master League team, not even as an experiment (so don’t think about suggesting it, because it’s not ever gonna happen).

2020 will be my 14th season. In years gone by it’s around about now in a Master league career that I start thinking about what will happen to my team in three or four seasons’ time. In 2024 a lot of my current crop of players will be at or near retirement age. My current youthful stars will be starting to decline. I’ve always found it best to start planning for that stage right now.

So I popped along to the Youth list. (I could never, under any circumstances, call it the ‘Rookie’ list, just as I will never call a football team’s strip a ‘uniform’.)

Once again I found the list pretty bare. I suppose it’s still a mite too early for some of the game’s megastars to have played their full careers, retired, and come back as Regens. (Rooney and Torres, both late-thirtysomethings, are still out there playing.)

I only signed two players—Scholes and Saviola. They’re both 18 years old, so I must have missed seeing them last year. Lucky for me that no one else picked them up.

I’m a big fan of Paul Scholes in real life. Like every other great English player of his generation, he failed dismally to establish himself on the international stage, but at club level he was magnificent in his prime. And he’s still not too bad now. I was delighted to get him as a raw 18-year-old. When his time comes, he’ll be a solid replacement for Camacho out there on the right side of midfield. (Camacho will be 30 next season!)

As for Saviola, I have fond memories of this player from PES6. In every Master League career there comes a time when you get your first real, proper striker, and you start to play the ball around him and score goals regularly with him after a long, dour struggle with the Defaults, and it’s just magical. In PES6, that striker was Saviola. His stats look pretty good right now even for an 18-year-old. (And for some reason, he’s been given a starting Agility stat of 97 - ! At the age of 18. How very peculiar.)

I didn’t get anyone else. The two new boys will sit on the bench. I’ll play them whenever I think I can get away with playing them. It’s actually a few seasons too early for wholesale rebuilding efforts. The crunch for me and this squad will come when several of my players start hitting their mid-thirties and I have to start releasing them. I’ll only keep a few of them to let them have that emotional farewell game before their retirement. I’m not sentimental.