My 3rd season of Master League in PES2009 is about to start. I’ve decided to go ahead and play it rather than returning to FIFA09 at the moment. I’m waiting for the PS3 version of FIFA09 to be patched—the through-ball bug really makes it all but unplayable.

Yes, I do also have the Xbox360 version of FIFA09, which is largely free of the accursed bug. I’m in the midst of a very enjoyable Atletico Madrid career. But my 360 is far too prone to random freezes that require complete restarts, losing any progress made in a match. It’s deeply annoying when you only have a limited time in which to play.

So I’m carrying on with PES2009. Patch or no patch, I’ll be back on FIFA09 after one more Master League season. Yes. I can stop any time I want to. Just… one… more… season…

If I don’t get promoted in season 2010-2011, it’ll make this career officially my worst-ever ML campaign in all my time playing PES. I’ve never spent more than three seasons in the lower division. Not that I can remember, anyway.

I’ve decided to leave the difficulty on Professional for the upcoming season. I started this career on Top Player, but then played FIFA09 for so long that when I returned to PES2009 I couldn’t adapt back. I felt I had to drop down to Professional. Playing at this level seems plenty hard enough for me right now. 

There’s one long-standing Master League routine of mine that I’ve so far not mentioned on the blog. Anybody who has watched my PES5 goal compilations (Volume 1 and Volume 2) may have wondered why my Coventry City team are always wearing differently styled and coloured kits. All the goals seen in those two videos were from the same ML career. (I got to season 2045, passing through two whole generations of Regens—and then PES6 came out.)

I had a routine of changing the kits every season. Just for variety’s sake. I never got round to resuming this tradition on PES2008. The next-gen version had relatively few Editing functions, and was in any case a bad game. I wasn’t motivated to care enough about my team to want to dress them up anew every season.

This year, strangely, I do care. I never expected things to be this way, but there you go. For season 2010-2011, I’ve altered the Home stip, ditching the stripes and the all-Sky-Blue colouring. Black trimming and sleeves are in.

No, it’s not a masterpiece of a kit. I’ve really got to do something about that badge (and would it be too self-regarding for me to have a peschronicles.co.uk shirt logo?). But I traditionally don’t spend all that much time on the new seasonal kit. I tend to just flick through some options and stop at the first one I like the look of. I’m a slovenly, random-hearted kit-creator. Those PES5 videos will back me on this one…

———-

Down to the real business: actually surviving to see another season. I was running a serious risk of Game Over. My end-of-season salary bill was going to be about 7500 points. And I only had about 6000 in the bank. Since the mid-season I’d had several players on the transfer list but, as ever in Master League, none of the CPU teams had ever shown any interest in them. In FIFA09, the opposite problem is the case: you are guaranteed to sell your players in the first week after putting them up for sale. Both are preposterous extremes. Why can’t either PES or FIFA ever get it just right?

So I couldn’t rely on the transfer market coming to my rescue. I set up five pre-season friendlies in order to try to acquire points. I wanted to set up more, but the game wouldn’t let me. It said my team’s reputation wasn’t big enough. Humph. No matter: with an average of 800 points for a win, I could secure the future of my team with just a couple of victories. A few more victories, and I might even be able to get some new players. These pre-season friendlies are great!

I lost all five games. The picture on the left tells the story.  Each X in the picture signifies a defeat. One of them was a thumping 6-0 defeat against a pretty impressive World XI. It was one of those matches where I was lucky to get nil. The mistake I made in this sequence was accepting the opponents that the game chose for me.

I was still in trouble. Thankfully, heading into the last few negotiation weeks, a miraculous thing happened. A CPU team bought one of my players. No, I couldn’t believe it either. Libermann was the man in question, and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. That was 1200 points in one go. Only a couple of hundred more to make up now.

In the last negotiation week, I knew what I had to do. Releasing players is a last resort but often there’s nothing else for it. I released Huylens and Burchet.  This brought my squad down to just 21 players—a dangerously low level, with player fitness from game to game being what it is. But I had to count myself lucky. Without the timely sale of Libermann I’d have had to release probably another three or four players. Obviously the game had seen I was in trouble, and it threw me a bone.

Here’s the final tale of the tape—I squeaked through with just 30 points to spare:

And so to season 2010-2011. With zero new players and no money in the bank, it’s going to be tough on a number of fronts. And if I don’t get promoted, it’ll be my worst-ever ML start. No pressure.

I’ve played all remaining games in my current Master League season on PES2009. There are no ’single-year’ seasons this year. In older PES games you started a Master League in season 2005, say, then the next season was season 2006, followed by season 2007, and so on. In PES2009, the first season is called 2008-2009. And I’ve now finished my second season, 2009-2010.

It’s been a pretty bad season, one of my worst-ever in Master League. First, the positive. Just before the end of the season I enjoyed my one and only victory, a hugely enjoyable 1-3 result at Gothenburg.

As much as I enjoyed the win (and after an otherwise winless season, believe me I enjoyed it), it gave me a certain sinking feeling for a brief moment or two. I’m very suspicious of PES2009 in the post-PES2008 world. I’m permanently on my guard. I’m forever watchful, waiting for the overhwelmingly positive experience that I’ve had over the past couple of weeks to change into a nightmare.

Any sign whatsoever of me playing well or scoring a few goals in PES2009 immediately makes me suspect that this could be the beginning of the end. That I’ll soon be literally running circles around entire CPU teams and scoring hat-tricks for fun, just as in PES2008. I’ve already seen enough of PES2009 to know that this probably won’t happen. But what if PES2009 has its own monsters lurking in the basement? Its own versions of the things that made PES2008 into A Game That Will Live In Infamy?

It does preoccupy me. I think I’ve mentioned the worry, in some form, every day on the blog since I started playing PES2009 again. I won’t be able to shake it off until I’ve grown very familiar with the ins and outs of PES2009. Which means winning Trebles in Master League, of course. How easy or hard that proves to be will ultimately determine how good or bad PES2009 is—for me, of course. This ‘Treble Test’ of a PES game’s worth is an entirely personal thing. Other evaluatory procedures are available…

Okay, enough hand-wringing and fretting about the future for PES2009. How did my current season end?

Badly, as I said. Here’s the final lower end of the table—who’s that at the bottom?

Ouch. Finishing bottom of the league with a W1-D9-L12 record is possibly my worst-ever finish in the second season in any Master League. I did fail to win a single game in my first season on last-gen PES2008. That was the worst worst-ever.

A win percentage of 4.55 is laughable. Even in my first season on Top Player I did better than that.

That final win didn’t do much to improve my transfer funds, really. I’m left with 6000 points in the bank and a 7500 salary bill. Negotiations are next. I’m thinking that pre-season friendlies might come to my rescue here.

A terrible season all round. I’ve not been helped by the mid-season negotiations. I can’t afford to buy anyone new. In fact, I should start to consider which players I can afford to release. I don’t want to get to the end of the season and find it impossible to avoid a Game Over. I haven’t had a Game Over in Master League since my very first Master League campaign back on PES2. That came about through inexperience, not knowing the signs, being complacent, thinking I could still do it even when I blatantly couldn’t. This time there’d be no excuse.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if I was picking up the odd win, but my record for the season so far is: ZERO wins. At least I’m getting a few draws, but they don’t help on the salary points front as much as wins would. I was 1-0 up in the last game before negotiations and gave away an awful last-minute equaliser. It was one of those passages of CPU play where its now-infamous MOMENTUM carries it through. I was gutted, more heart-broken than any game so far. It would have been my first three points of the season.

Heading into mid-season negotiations I had only 3200 points in the bank; my end-of-season wages would be in the 8200 region. I had a good look through the transfer market at all the players I would have tried to sign if I could. I saw Simao in there, ridiculously out of reach. I’ve got to know Simao thanks to my deeply enjoyable Manager Mode career with Atletico Madrid on FIFA09. He’ll probably be retired by the time I’m able to get him here in PES2009. I’ll have to wait for him to reappear as a Regen. Will I still be playing PES2009 by then? I just might be, you know…

I suppose I could have blown my meagre funds on a few other good players, and banked on turning things around in the second half of the season. But that’d be just asking for trouble. When it comes to risking a Game Over, I always play it safe.

So I have big problems unless results pick up. I put a few players on the transfer market: Ximelez, Burchet, Libermann, a few others. That lot. Nobody bid for them, of course. I’d already got rid of a few Default players in the pre-season, trimming my squad down to 26 players.

This is a recurrent problem for me in Master League. I struggle, and often have to go down to a bare-bones squad in order to survive until the next season. Something similar happened to me in the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008 back in the spring. At one stage during that Master League campaign I had to dig deep and pull out results using a squad of just 16 players. I came through it eventually—actually quite quickly, from what I remember—but PES2009 is a whole different kettle of eggs…

I’m still finding it hard. Hard, and rewarding. I admire this game more and more as the days go by. I still think I might be under some kind of evil magic spell, keeping me away from FIFA09, playing what is—on the face of it—an inferior game.

And yet, and yet… In a surprising number of ways, PES2009 isn’t an inferior game.