It’s pre-season in my surprisingly tough Master League career in the surprisingly good PES2009 on PS3. A few weeks ago, after a sacking on FIFA09’s Manager Mode I picked up Konami’s creaking old game again, just to see how the old girl felt after a few weeks with EA’s loose-limbed young hussy. And I’m still here. It’s far too early yet to draw any final conclusions from this. My own tentative conclusion is that I seem to have two very playable and thoroughly enjoyable football games this year, and I don’t want the feeling to end.

My Master League struggles are unprecedented on any version of PES. This will be my 4th season in the bottom division. Over the past few seasons I’ve struggled to pay the salary. This time last season I was forced to cut my squad to just 23 players. I thought that was bad enough but now I’ve got a shortfall of 3300 points and it’s going to be tight. Very tight.

I scheduled 5 pre-season friendlies again. I was going to change the fixtures chosen for me and choose different, weaker teams, but in the end I left the fixtures well alone. I wanted to take on the bigger teams and hopefully snatch a victory or two. Even a few draws would help. The bigger the team, the more money you get for a win or draw.

Before playing my first match, against Feyenoord, I changed my kits again. This is something I do after nearly every ML season and always have done, really. I only took a break from doing it last year because PES2008 just wasn’t worth the effort. PES2009, however, is.

I went for a mostly-white home kit with Sky Blue trimmings and sleeves. The away kit is a kind of burgundy-red with Sky Blue trimmings. Whatever kit I go for I like to keep at least a hint of Sky Blue somewhere. Master League with its version of Coventry City is all taking place in my head anyway. But I like to keep some kind of connection, however tenuous, with the real football world.

I did a lot better than last year in my pre-season friendlies. A draw and a win brought in 1200 points. Perhaps this is a reflection that I’m slowly—very slowly—starting to get to grips with PES2009.

I put a whole host of players up for sale, hoping for a similar stroke of good fortune that saw the CPU actually buy one of them last year. This year, however, I had no offers and faced the last week of negotiations with a serious cash shortfall and a serious headache. You get a Game Over in Master League if you can’t pay your team’s wages at the end of the last week of negotiations.

I suppose it could have been worse. Thanks to that draw and win in the friendlies, I ‘only’ had to release 5 players. Among them was Schone, one of my signings in that first mid-season negotiations. That one hurt.

The upshot of all my releasing is that I’m left with a squad of just 17 players. Which is ridiculous. But it’s not as bad as it might appear. The Division 2 schedule is a pretty forgiving one. Matches are spread over many weeks, and there are lots of rest breaks. All I have to do is struggle through to the mid-season negotiations, and then I can pick up a few new players.

On the right is my complete, ridiculously small squad for the start of season 2011-2012. This is going to be hard work. I actually can’t wait to get started.

Last season I just about squeezed through negotiations with 30 salary points to spare. This season it was even tighter. The margin was 11 points. I can’t go on living dangerously like this. My plan for the coming season is simple: win some bloody matches…

It’s a weird game, this PES2009. Coming so hot on the heels of the biggest FAIL that the ISS/PES series has ever known, it started very much on the back foot. I was suspicious of it—and I still am suspicious of it now, in truth. But it is a good game. And it’s got depths that you might never discover if you do what I did and just react in abject horror to its ‘on-rails’ feel after the liquidity of FIFA09. But the truth is—or seems to be at the moment—that they’re both good games.

That’s my two penn’orth anyway. It’s already a familiar theme from me this year, and I hope to be repeating myself, in various forms, from now until September 2009, when the next big thing comes along.

When I fired up PES2008 this morning, my PS3 blinked at me a couple of times, then displayed the news that there was another patch for the game. It was 130MB in size and took a little over three minutes to download.

This was a surprise. I’ve heard no rumours about another patch. When the game started I was keen to see what changes had been made. I think that this patch may be intended to rectify the still-awful condition of the PS3’s online game. I’m not big on online play and I didn’t have time this morning to go online to find out what, if anything, has changed.

One thing that I was hoping for was for pre-game kit selection to be introduced in all offline game modes. But no, it wasn’t. We’re going to be left twisting in the wind on this one all year. Kit selection exists in Exhibition mode, so why, in the name of all that’s holy, is it missing in every other mode? Why?

First impressions of offline gameplay after the new patch is that replays seem to be a lot smoother, and actually watchable most of the time. But you can never underestimate the placebo effect. I’ve got a few days off work and will be playing PES2008 a lot - online and offline - so I’ll post in a day or two about this new patch.

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Here in the last third of the season, it’s time to face up to something: the Superleague is hard.

Thanks to the cash brought in by Elcherino’s notorious/celebrated run in my team last season, I bought players well above the ability levels of the players I had at a similar stage of my last ML career.

I should be achieving a lot more with this squad. Instead I’m plodding along in the bottom 8 of the table. It’ll all have to improve next season.

Feyenoord 1-0 Singers FC

This was actually the first-leg match of the D2 Cup Quarter Final - something I didn’t realise until after the match was over and the post-match calendar revealed the shocking truth. I’d just played one of the most important games of my season without knowing it. Er. Ooops?

Never mind. I’d still played as well as I could. I just couldn’t seem to get a break for the whole game. Feyenoord were in supercharged mode throughout. Despite this, I enjoyed the overwhelming share of possession - 75% at half time, 61% at full time. Possession counts for nothing on its own.

I’ll have to play really well in the second leg to advance to the semis. I want that trophy. If nothing else, it’d boost my club ranking and enable me to get some great players in the off-season. I’m going to need them in 2009.

Spartak Moscow 1-0 Singers FC

Back to the league. I had two players sent off. Bale was red-carded for a professional foul (naughty me, but no complaints). I reorganised my team, going to two up front and bringing on Ruskin for Leonardo. Then Ruskin was sent off for a typical PES2008 nothing-tackle. He’d been on the pitch for one minute.

D2 Cup Quarter Final 2nd leg:
Singers FC 3-0 Feyenoord (3-1 on aggregate)

(I knew it was the Cup this time.)

I made it. In truth, it was easy. Feyenoord were strangely subdued, or my lads were on fire, or both, or the Team Seabass script in the game’s dark heart was written in my favour, or all of these together were true, or none of them were true and I’m a fool, or, or - oh, who cares? I was happy.

Here are the goals:

I had Bale sent off again near the end. That boy’s getting himself a reputation. Referees are picking on him, I swear it.

Singers FC 0-2 Ajax

A post-Cup hangover saw my subdued, lightweight team get turned over with ease by the Dutch masters.

Singers FC 2-0 Marseille

Leonardo finally scored his first goal, a tap-in from six yards after a goalkeeper fumble. I’ll take it…

At last, it was time.

Time to start a new Master League career, with a new team, in a new league - and, eventually, with some strict House Rules.

Those House Rules will come in at the end of the first season. They’re needed to extend PES2008’s longevity. (Curse you Seabass!, etc.) I found that my first PES2008 Master League career was just so, so easy in the end. In my fifth and final season I was only seriously challenged on one or two occasions. I scored 136 goals in the League and won the Treble with ease. Usually I start a Master League career and just play that for the whole of the PES year. That is not an option this time around.

After spending most of the past week playing FIFA, I needed a warm-up match on PES2008. So I loaded up my first ML team, Coventry City, and had a few games.

After several days spent with the formidable simulation that is FIFA08 (nb: on the two next-gen consoles only), it was strange at first. PES2008 really deserves its faintly insulting description of arcadey.

I was soon back in the groove. After thumping Manchester United 5-0 with Schwarz and Shimizu et al, I decided that was enough warming up. On with the main event.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

I thought long and hard about playing another career with a team called Coventry City, using the same Sky Blue home kit and all-white away kit.

Those kits had a lot going for them. In five full seasons I never suffered a single instance of PES2008’s infamous kit-clashes.

I decided to go with a different team name and a different set of kits. Better to start completely afresh with another team and another set of kits.

When it came to the name, I decided to call my team after the original name of the real Coventry City Football Club. Thus my team is called - wait for it - SINGERS FC.

Yes, Singers FC.

The short version of the story is that Singers was the name of the football club that eventually became Coventry City. I kind of wish I’d gone with The Bantams now - that was CCFC’s nickname for three-quarters of a century until Jimmy Hill came along. But Singers FC it is and will remain. It still makes me wince slightly, but I am slowly getting used to it.

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After choosing my new team’s name, a new home and away kit was needed.

The home kit on the left was not intended to be a day-glo version of the Man Utd strip. I just sort of randomly played around with the buttons until I got a result that I liked (a bit like PES2008 itself, eh?)

The away kit on the right dazzled my mobile phone camera. It’s a kind of livid puke-green. It was intended to be as opposite from the home kit as possible.

I hate the kits. Both of them. I was too impatient to get started. I intend to change these kits at the first opportunity. I’ve already tried to change them in the top menu’s Edit mode, but the changes don’t appear in Master League. I’ll have to wait until after this first season is over. Feast your eyes on the abominations above, because they’re on show for one season only.

Let this be a lesson to all Master League aspirants: Set up in haste, repent at leisure.

THE SUPERLEAGUE

I did take a good deal of time and thought over the composition of the two Superleague divisions. Here they are:

Division 1 is self-explanatory: every top club in the game.

Choosing the teams for Division 2 was more problematic. I had to make it challenging, but not so tough that by the time I won promotion I would by default be good enough immediately to challenge for honours in Division 1. Have I got it right? With all of those ‘lesser’ Italian teams in there, I might have made it too demanding, and eventually I’ll go up to Division 1 more than ready for the big boys. Time will tell.

If nothing else it’ll be intriguing to see how the CPU teams fare against each other in these two divisions. Who will be promoted and relegated as the seasons start to pass?

I’ve already played the first 5 games of the season. I’ll post about them tomorrow.