It was crunch time for me and my Treble. I’d just won the league title here in season 2020 of what is turning out to be another long Master League career. Winning the title on its own is pretty good, of course, but the Treble is where it’s all at in this game. I’ve already won a few Trebles, most recently last season. Back-to-back Trebles would be very nice indeed.

I was in the Division 1 Cup final and the European Championship final—i.e., PES’s Champions League equivalent. If the persistent rumour is true and Konami have secured the rights for the Champions League, will this competition have its ‘proper’ name in PES2009’s Master League? In other words, will this most prestigious of real-life Cup competitions find itself integrated into the often bizarre, made-up football game world of Master League?

I strongly doubt it. Somehow I can’t quite see Manchester Red pitching up against London Blue in the Champions League. Even with all the teams edited to look right, you’ve still only got four leagues. No, it just wouldn’t be right. It’d be a waste of the license. The debate is raging, but I’d bet on a standalone Champions League game using the PES engine coming out at some point in the 2008/2009 football game year.

Anyway, about those Cup finals. The ones I had to win in order to secure an historic consecutive Treble.

The Division 1 Cup final was first. It was against Basel—or FC Basel 1893, to give them their resounding full name. They were the easiest opponents I can remember having in a Cup final. I won the game at a canter, 3-0.

The European Cup final was the next and final component of the Treble. It was against Ajax—of Amsterdam, I often find myself mentally adding. I come from an era when TV and radio commentators always called them Ajax of Amsterdam. Sometime around the late 1980s they stopped doing that and started calling them simply Ajax, but for me the add-on element has hung around like an echo.

It was the first time I could remember playing Ajax (of Amsterdam) in this career. They were pretty tough, but not in a good sense. They were tough in the bad sense—in the sense that there seemed to be an underlying script at work that said “every time the human team scores, the CPU team scores.” Okay, my defending was probably suspect for some of their goals. Whatever, I won it 4-3.

And that was the Treble. I’d done it. Two in a row.

The only thing left to do was navigate my way through my remaining league fixtures without conceding too many more goals. I had another target to meet before season’s end: concede less than 20 goals. I was doing very well so far with just 14 goals against. If I could get through my last three league games without conceding more than 5 goals, it’d make it a truly remarkable season.

I’ll cut to the chase: I conceded 1 goal in each of the remaining games. I beat Sevilla 6-1 (always easy meat, them). I beat my next opponent 3-1. I drew the final game of the season 1-1. Conceding a goal in each of these games was slightly disappointing, and suspicious. I find that I am always suspicious of PES lately.

But I was comfortably under the 20-goals margin. I finished the season with 78 points. I was a massive 22 points ahead of a slightly resurgent Barcelona in second place. Valencia, after a poor season by their standards, were 4 points behind Barca. In other items of interest, Real Madrid managed to drag themselves up from mid-table to finish in 6th place. And Osasuna, my long-time nemesis, failed to win promotion back to Division 1. I won’t be seeing them until at least 2022 now. Ha.

I won 25 games, drew 3 games, and lost 2 games (boo). I scored 82 goals, and conceded just 17, giving me a final goal difference of +65.

All of which begs an obvious question: has PES2008 become too easy? My view right now is that it’s still a bit too early for me to tell. 2020 was a great season—a miracle year in so many ways. (But for those two defeats, it would have been just perfect…) It could be a one-off. If season 2021 is another season like this one, then yes, I’d say PES2008 is too easy for me. PES4 was the last PES game that I thought was a little too easy. We’ll see how PES2008 plays out after next season.

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.

Almeria are back in Division 1 of my Master League. I have to be careful when talking about them, as I tend to confuse them with Heracles Almelo, and swap their names around (i.e., ‘Heracles Almeria’, etc.). As much as I’m looking forward to this year’s brace of football games, beginning with FIFA09 in September and then PES2009 in October, I’ll be sorry to leave PES2008 and this particular Master League behind. I’ve had some great games in it and would count it as possibly my second-favourite ML career ever (PES5 would be #1).

But I don’t necessarily have to abandon it in Septemeber/October, of course. There’s always the PSP. I could easily continue this ML career on the PSP forever, in tandem with whatever I get up to on FIFA09/PES2009. It’s a possibility.

So, anyway, Almeria: they’re a bottom-of-the-league team this season, which naturally means they’re tougher to play against than Real Madrid and Baracelona combined. This is no lazy exaggeration, as my fellow ML players will know all too well. I couldn’t pass, I couldn’t run, I couldn’t shoot.

Almeria, with a relative handful of wins and goals to their name all season, were faster, stronger, and more skilful. They took the lead with a penalty after ten minutes. It was a rash challenge from my defender. I was too anxious to protect Cech, my new, raw, 17-year-old goalkeeper, whom I’d picked for this game just to give him some experience and start to build his teamwork rating. I felt it was worth the risk now that I haven’t got an unbeaten record to protect.

But I have still got another bonus target to aim for: conceding less than 20 goals in the league. At this stage, just after halfway, I’ve only conceded 9 goals all season. I’ve got a great chance of doing it.

When the Almeria player broke through I had no confidence in Cech stopping the goal, and I clumsily barged their player off the ball with my defender. The referee immediately gave the penalty. I was expecting a red card for the last-man challenge, but I didn’t even get a yellow. That was something, I suppose. Almeria scored the penalty and I was really up against it.

The game got to the 80th minute and it was still 0-1 to them. It looked like being another ignominious defeat. I was depressed about it. The league title was still probably safe, but after going unbeaten for so long it just felt so lame to lose a couple of games in quick succession like this. Ah, but then Andy Cole—having a quiet season, overall—popped up to score a stylish equaliser:

For anyone unable or unwilling to view the replay, I’ll describe the goal (I find embedded YouTube videos just a bit tiresome too…). Andy Cole, playing on the right up front, lays the ball off to Bradley and starts a run forward. Bradley dinks the ball over the top for Cole to chase. Still about 25 yards out, Cole takes the shot on the half-volley with a delicious scissors-kick. The ball flashes over the keeper’s head into the net. 1-1, and I had to be satisfied with that.

I won the final game of my European Championship qualifying group and finished in first place. My reward? A quarter-final tie against Barcelona. It shouldn’t be too tough, but I’d still have preferred one of the lesser teams.

In the first leg of the D1 Cup semi-final I played Real Madrid—an extremely fast and aggressive and skilful Real Madrid... Kaiser was magnificent for them, dominating play and going on runs for the hell of it. Within the first 15 minutes he’d created four clear-cut chances, two of which came back off my goal’s woodwork.

I sensed danger, somehow… I went into the Formation screen and did something I rarely do. I put a man-marker on Kaiser. I rarely see the point in man-marking, but on this occasion it seemed to work. Bradley was my chosen man and he reduced Kaiser’s effectiveness almost immediately. The game ended 0-0. The second leg will be at their ground.