PES Chronicles

Alongside my brave new world of online poker playing (and I’m absolutely obsessed at the moment) I’m still plugging away with my Manager Mode career on FIFA09. I’m playing as Coventry City. I’ve recently done a very bad thing—I admit it—and started playing using fully Assisted control settings.

A lot of this decision was shaped by me starting to take a bigger interest in other things than football gaming. There are all the other games I want to play, and there is poker, and there is work, and there are countless other things to attend to day in, day out. With all these other activities I find that I don’t have time to spend mastering the Semi-Assisted/Manual settings that I was using in FIFA09. I’ll go back and try them again eventually. But not right now. Life’s just too full at the moment.

And what’s so bad about Assisted anyway? Yes, you are helped to play the game to an almost absurd degree. But I still find the game bleedin’ hard when using these supposedly easy settings. A massive portion of that difficulty comes from using the lower-ability Coventry City players. As others have remarked, FIFA09 seems to be optimised for the big teams and big players. It’s such a different game with the lesser teams and players.

I’m floating in mid-table with the January transfer window just around the corner. I won’t be sacked again. I’m picking up enough draws and wins to keep my head above water—thanks mainly to those Assisted settings. But I’m not scoring anywhere near as many goals as I should be. My record is something like 1 goal per game, on average.

One thing I have had success with is the lay-off free kick. A few weeks ago I showed off my best-so-far lay-off goal. I nearly always force a save from the keeper now. And now I’ve got another one—scored with the same player, Isaac Osbourne. I’ve looked at his stats and he doesn’t seem to have any special ability re. free kicks. When FIFA09 came out I remember hearing that a lot of special player attributes were going to be masked (if so, why?). So perhaps Osbourne’s some kind of free kick ninja on the quiet.

Here’s that second lay-off free kick goal. I think it’s a better one than the first, if only for the increased angle and the way the ball smacks into the net off the underside of the bar. It’s always one for the scrapbook when that happens. In the clip the view is from behind the opposition net:

FIFA09 and free kicks. There, I’ve said it. FIFA09. Free kicks. What gives?

I haven’t had the best of times with free kicks in this game. I’ve yet to score direct from a free kick, even in my early days of playing on Semi-Pro with all the control assists turned on.

Last year on FIFA08 I had a pretty good record with free kicks. I scored roughly one in three from the prime danger area around the box. I’d make the keeper pull off a save with most of the other attempts. Free kicks were pretty easy in FIFA08, but that was a different game that I always played with the shooting assists turned on. Maybe I’d find similar success in FIFA09 if I turned the assists back on here? I won’t, though. I want to plough on with semi-assisted shooting, and see where it takes me.

But, yes, the point of today’s post is that I’ve finally scored from a free kick. Albeit from a layoff—knocking the ball to one side for a loitering third player to have a shot. Here it is—my young defensive midfielder Isaac Osbourne supplies the tidy finish:

It’s not the best viewing angle. The ball could do with being a bit more visible. I know that there are a few video streaming websites with better quality than YouTube. But this does its job, I think. It shows me scoring a goal with a fine strike—if I may say so myself—from a layoff from a free kick. (Before anyone asks me how the layoff is done: pull LT/L2 to summon the second player. Then hold LT/L2 whilst pointing to either side with the left stick, and press A/X to perform the layoff. The player who will take the shot is automatically in position and doesn’t need to be summoned beforehand.)

I’d estimate that this was my 100th attempt to score a goal from a free kick layoff. This was my first successful attempt. Most of the others went badly wide or thudded straight into the keepers’ midriffs. A high enough percentage of them went just wide, or hit the post/bar, or were tipped aside by a spectacular keeper dive for me to want to keep trying to score. Finally I get my reward.

The goal won me the match, incidentally. It improved my standing with the board, but I’m still 19th in the table and only a couple of defeats away from another crisis.

Season 2009 got underway with a big game against Lazio, one of Division 2’s toughest teams.

Lazio always give me a good game. I don’t recall ever having an easy time against them. Truth be told, there aren’t many games where I have a really easy time against anyone. It’s not just because most of my players are only above-average. My House Rules dictate that I keep the size of my squad to 25 players and that at least 5 of them have to be original Default players. Consequently I struggle to field a decent, fit team. Usually about half my players are missing several notches from their green stamina bars.

The only times when this does not apply are at the start of the season and just after the mid-season negotiations. So, actually, right now is the best possible time to play Lazio. I approached the game as if it was a very early championship six-pointer…

Singers FC 1-0 Lazio

…and it didn’t disappoint. This was one of the hardest games to get a result from that I have ever played on PES2008.

From start to finish it was as if I was fighting with the controller to get my players to do what I wanted them to do. I don’t think it was scripting. I never felt that my players were suspiciously below-par.

It was the Lazio players. They were superb, always chasing me down, intercepting passes, stringing together dangerous moves. My new defensive pairing of Jackson and Kompany (Jackson & Ko., I might start calling them) had their work cut out stopping the trademark Italian passing triangles on the edge of my box. Mathieu played deeper in this game than he probably will for the rest of the season. He was a true DMF, making numerous last-ditch tackles and generally just getting in the opposition’s way. Akinfeev was heroic at times in goal.

Then I had Kompany sent off. It was in the middle of the second half and I was starting to get complacent, thinking I had the defensive game sussed. I mistimed a sliding tackle and that was that: red card. Looks like I picked the wrong season to give up playing dirty…

But yet again, having 10 men seemed to give me a new lease of life. This happens so often in PES2008 that I have to say I believe it must be hard-coded into the game that a human player enjoys a wee bonus with 10 men. I kept the ball better. I passed better. My aerial through-balls started penetrating the Lazio back line. Near the end, I forced a corner…

The goal was a Lazio own-goal. I’ll take it.

Sampdoria 1-0 Singers FC

This game was everything that the Lazio game wasn’t. I enjoyed the lion’s share of possession, keeping Sampdoria down to one half-chance for most of the game, and pounding their goal with shot after shot (after shot) seemingly at will. Surely it was only a matter of time before I broke through?

But no. Their keeper saved everything. In three consecutive attacks I hit the post, the bar, and then the other post. I had that sinking feeling…

On a breakaway attack by Sampdoria, it happened. Their striker broke through clean on goal. El Moubarki was nearby. I did it again. I deliberately fouled the striker, from behind, 25 yards out. A red card and a free kick followed.

They scored from it. I’ve started to remove my defensive wall before most CPU free kicks (L2+down on the D-pad, repeatedly, until it’s done). Doing this moves your keeper back towards the middle of the goal, making it easier for him to save direct shots from the free kick. My goals conceded from free kicks have gone down by about 75% since I started doing this.

Akinfeev saved this free kick—but only deflected it onto the bar. Naturally the ball rebounded back into play and bounced through a penalty box packed with my players straight to the lone Sampdoria player. He tucked it away.

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So, I start season 2009 with a victory and a defeat. Not too bad really. Could have been better. I’ve yet to score a proper goal. I’ve really missed Altintop. Caracciolo is good, but Altintop was very good and well on his way to becoming great. I’m sure I would have got at least one goal with him in these games.

When you play nothing but Master League, after a few games of a season you just know how it’s going to go. You can instinctively take the measure of your team. It’s too early to tell right now. I’ll know after playing a few more games and seeing how my new players bed down into the team. If Kompany, Cassano, and Mathieu turn out to be good buys—and if the likes of Camacho and Caracciolo continue their solid progress—I’m convinced I could not only win promotion but win the D2 Championship as well.

Amid all my dejection over PES2008’s relative badness I’ve found a goal replay from a few games ago that I think is a bit special. It’s a free kick scored from a long way out and from a relatively acute angle.

The scorer is Schwarz. I went with him as the kicker in this situation because I wanted his shot power more than I wanted the technique of somebody like Shaw.

It’s one of my favourite goals in PES2008 so far. Yes, the keeper gets a hand to it and palms it into the roof of the net, but I don’t think even PES2008’s infamous keepers can be blamed for this one.

Recently I spent about an hour practicing free kicks on the training ground. I discovered that free kicks are not always fated to fly high over the bar or slam embarrassingly into the wall.

There are many little tricks that improve free kicks. I have found that simply reading the manual is the best trick of all.

My favourite free kick technique in PES2008: push up on the left stick. Press the shoot button for the desired amount of power. Then, just as the kicker is taking his run up, twist the stick in the desired direction, left or right, to apply some spin. If extra shot-power is required, tap Triangle (or Y on the 360) just as he connects with the ball. (That latter technique – adding power with a tap of a button – can be devastatingly effective when trying to score through a gap next to the wall.)

I used all three techniques for the Schwarz free kick goal, with the result seen. It might not satisfy PES purists, but I’m happy enough with it to declare it an early contender for my personal goal of the season.