This Charming Man Utd 4
Season 2016 has come to an end and it’s been a truly weird one. I can’t remember having a season like it. There haven’t really been many ups or downs. It’s mostly been a flat line, mooching unspectacularly along…
My final league record was Won:12, Drawn: 17, Lost: 9. My final position was 10th—not too bad I suppose, all things considered—but my overall win ratio of 38.5% is one of the worst I can ever remember having at this stage of a PES game’s lifespan. By now, a few months after release, and with ten seasons of ML under my belt, I’m usually ruling the place. More or less.

So many drawn games. That’s what’s costing me right now. It must be a fault with me, with the way I’m playing the game—otherwise the forums would be overwhelmed with people saying there are too many draws, and OMG TEH SCRIPTING, and the like.
Not that I ever really look at the forums any more, so for all I know they might be chock-full of people discussing these issues. After an intense period in the few months leading up to release, and for a few weeks after it, I’m hardly away from the major PES and FIFA forums. But nowadays? Now, it’s a rare week when I drop in even once at PESfan, EvoWeb, PES Gaming, and the like. I’m very much a solipsistic gamer, in case that wasn’t already obvious from my frequent anti-online tirades.
Despite the mediocrity of my League performance I had the opportunity to grab some glory in the Division 1 Cup. Oh, and a European place next season. Mustn’t forget that.
I’d made my way to the final with suspicious ease. I’d had nothing but draws in the league. At one point it’d felt as if the cup matches were the only matches I was ‘allowed’ to actually win.
My opponents were Man Utd. This did not alarm me. Every Master League player knows that the supposed top teams are better to face in a big game than the likes of Sunderland, say. Man Utd were all that stood between me and salvaging something from the most unremarkable season I think it’s possible to have. (Well, okay, my freakish amount of draws made the season remarkable, technically speaking, but you know what I mean.)

I was delighted to find something rare in the pre-game screen: most of my top players fit and in form. Look at those form arrows! Usually there’s a couple of green form arrows amongst any starting lineup, but not this time. Prior to the final I’d broken clear of my drawing-every-game phase in the league, and enjoyed a few good wins. This was one of the most fearsomely in-form teams I had ever gone out onto a virtual football pitch with.
It was Man Utd’s kickoff, and I was hit with a goal straightaway. Man Utd waltzed the ball upfield and started to threaten. They held onto the ball no matter what I did. I recovered possession a few times but couldn’t get it out of my half. There was always a Man Utd player just there. There was no way out. If I tried hoofing the ball clear, my player would take an unaccountably long time to perform the action and the clearance would be smothered. All the usual shenanigans going on in the first few minutes… Oh yes, I knew what was coming.
Their goal came, and the pressure slackened. I was less annoyed than I should have been. PES2009 does this a hell of a lot, like I said, so I suppose I’m used to it now. I accept it as part of the landscape when I play PES. It’s a video game, and video games traditionally provide extra-hard boss fights at the end of a level. The programmers of PES decided that this cup final would be like an end-of-level boss fight for me. That was fine. Really it was. This is an example of my new attitude to PES. A philosophical attitude…
I wanted to get my equaliser before half time, and succeeded. Koeman—a forgotten man of my squad, but still a very good player—got on the end of a floated cross. He stabbed it into the net at the second attempt—after one of those heart-in-mouth pauses when every player around the ball, defenders included, seems to stop and stare at it, or at each other.
This ‘frozen defender’ syndrome, with a dangerous ball running loose in the box, happened almost straight away at the other end of the pitch. This one felt more as if it was my fault. I thought I’d done enough to secure a half-time 1-1 scoreline, and assumed the CPU team would settle for that too. But no. It just went and scored another one in stoppage time, making it 2-1 at the break to Man Utd.
And that’s how it finished. In the second half Man Utd got surprisingly dirty. They had Wes Brown sent off halfway through. He hacked me down when I was clean through for a one-on-one! It was almost like playing a human. It was all constant pressure from me after that point. But I never got through, despite having at least a dozen chances, three or four of them gilt-edged ones. I lost the damn Cup final and it had felt as if there was nothing more I could have done to win it.
And so ends season 2016. A season that I am determined to forget as soon as possible. For me the most disappointing thing wasn’t the manner of my defeat in the Cup final, but all of those drawn League games. I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen again next season.







