I claimed my first win of season 2012 against a team called Heracles Almero. I’m playing in the PES2008 equivalent of La Liga, so I thought I’d have heard of most or all of the teams—but I’d never heard of Heracles Almero.

A quick Google of the name indicates that I’ve never heard of them because they’re really a quite obscure Dutch team. Their real name also seems to be Heracles Almelo. Hmmm all round, really.

The game looked like it was going to be yet another 0-0. After four of the blighters on the bounce I wasn’t too happy. When would I score another goal? When? There is something almost tragic about a 0-0 in football. Nil-nil just isn’t the point of what any game should be about, if that makes sense. I think the Americans had the right idea in the 1970s when they effectively banned 0-0 results from their ill-fated ’soccer’ league at the time.

Bradley was sitting out this game on the bench due to tiredness. I brought him on in the 79th minute. I had a throw-in deep in my own half, and worked the ball across the pitch to him. I ran him a little way forward, crossed the halfway line, shot speculatively… and the ball flew into the net through the CPU keeper.

Not literally through the keeper: on closer inspection the ball passed between his outstretched hands. He should have still saved it, but I was happy enough. Bradley’s sheer power had scored the winning goal. It was his first goal for my Coventry City with his first touch of the game. I’ve had plenty of players in PES with the Middle Shooting ability, but Bradley seems to have the most exquisite long-range power and placement of them all.

This boy is going to be something special. He already is something special. He’s only 21 years old. What will he be like in five seasons? The mind boggles. I might not even bother with Mathieu in this career—and that’s saying something for me. Bradley is Mathieu turned up to 11.

In the long-term, could Bradley become a ‘cheat player’ for me—almost an Elcherino?

I’ll have to watch this situation carefully, but it’s not an issue at the moment and I don’t think it will be. I have always been average at ‘proper’ PES, as this PSP/PS2 version is; I have always managed to play it for the whole PES year without boredom.

It’s well-known in the real-life professional game, by fans, players, and coaches alike, that a former player returning to play against an old club is more likely to score a goal than not score a goal. It’s just the way it works. The former player always scores.

It seems to work that way in PES2008 as well. I’m fully resigned to having my former ace striker Elcherino score against me every time I meet him in another team’s colours.

He’s still with Real Zaragoza at the moment—although the day cannot be far away when I buy him back just to put him on my bench and keep him there. My current House Rules forbid me from playing him in my team. The whole sorry Elcherino saga bubbled up over the Christmas and New Year period, and almost derailed my next-gen PES2008 career permanently. At the moment I’m taking a dim view of next-gen PES2008, but it’s not Elcherino’s or anybody else’s fault really. The game is just too easy. That’s its problem in a nutshell.

I went 0-1 up against Zaragoza (at their ground) and was cruising. Elcherino wasn’t in their starting line-up. He came on in the second half and got their equaliser almost immediately—a simple tap-in from a CPU cutback. I managed to keep him quiet after that, and scored my winner in the dying moments just when I’d resigned myself to a frustrating draw. 1-2 to me. Take that, Elcherino.

Next were one of the division pace-setters—Inter Milan, the wet dream-team of many an online PES2008 player. This one was a draw, 2-2. I was 2-0 up and comfortable with it, but started to get a little over-enthusiastic in my tackling as I tried to keep it that way. I had Matuzalem sent off, and Inter got it back to 2-1. Then I had Jackson sent off and they got it back to 2-2. I had several chances to score more goals myself but missed them all.

After Inter Milan, I had to play Barcelona. It was the game I’d been waiting for all season.

This screen was not what I wanted to see before the game:

What great timing. It’s only the biggest game of my season so far. Thanks, France.

(Incidentally, looking at that screenshot, it strikes me that for all the Internet chatter about greengrocer’s apostrophes and whatnot, a good case could be made for the exclamation mark being the single most overused and abused punctuation mark in the English language! They seem to be scattered everywhere!!)

I decided to just get on and do without Mathieu—no great loss, really, as he’s still not yet the triple-A player I knew in PES5 and PES6. Pjinatnigh came in at DMF. The remainder of my team was mostly fit and in form.

Melengue got the first goal—a sort of wonder dribble, but he only beat two Barcelona players before scoring, so it doesn’t really count. (A true wonder dribble, which can be accomplished in every single game in next-gen PES2008, sees the player ghosting past almost the entire opposition.)

Caracciolo got me another goal in the second half. Here it is:

And that’s how it finished. Singers FC 2-0 Barcelona. I am dumbfounded to be top of the league after 12 games.

As I whined about yesterday, the game seems to have stepped things up a notch since I went top of the table just before the middle of the season. My on-again/off-again/on-again love-hate-love-hate relationship with Sunderland in PES2008 has taken a new twist. They were my next league opponents. I was more than a little chagrined to find myself 3-0 down by half time.

As usual, Sunderland’s world-famous striker Daryl Murphy played like the unstoppable, wonder-dribbling, simply irrepressible force of nature that we all know him to be from his real-life performances in the Premier League. The greatest footballer of this or any other generation scored a hat trick as my feeble defenders struggled to stop him and failed. Daryl was immune to any and every challenge as he powered his way through my entire defence just like he does every week in real life. I was lucky not to concede 5 goals to the maestro before half time.

Somehow I pulled myself together. I changed things around slightly by moving Melengue up to the left-sided CF role in place of the ineffective Leonardo, and bringing on Rasnic in the left-sided AMF slot.

The effect was immediate. I got a couple of goals back with Rasnic, including this one (eerily reminiscent of a similar long-ranger from Camacho)—

—-to make it 3-2. Then I scrambled the equaliser with Gutierrez just before the end. 3-3. I had to settle for that.

I took on PSV at their place and won 1-4. Liked it. Things felt natural again. Things are always going to feel unnatural when the game’s beating you, because the only way it can beat you is to handicap you in some way. Most of the time.

I played Parma and Benfica in the next two games and drew them both, 2-2 and 1-1 respectively. These were pretty good games. I felt they were fairly balanced. That’s what Team Seabass should be working on, I think: redressing the AI/human imbalance that has crept into the franchise over the past few years. The AI advantage shouldn’t need to be turned up to 11, ever.

Here’s another goal from the apple of my eye, Mathieu:

I was trying to go on a wonder-dribble with Camacho, but he’s not able for it (not yet) so I had to lay the ball off to Mathieu, with the outcome that can be seen. No, it’s still not a true forty-yard net-burster into the postage stamp corner, but it’ll come. I’m sure of it. Mathieu just keeps getting better and better. His value as a DMF is immense. When he plays (and it’s a rare game when he doesn’t), the opposition has a tough time making things happen down the middle and just in front of my penalty box.

—————-

My recent run of poor and indifferent results means that I’m hovering just on the outer edge of the promotion places: hanging onto 3rd place by goal difference, and only 6 points clear of the 5th-placed team.

However, I’m only two points off top spot. I could—and should—still have a great chance of winning the championship.

But securing promotion comes first. Another poor run could see me drop out of contention altogether. The seasons in PES2008 are long and tiring, and I do not want to go through this again. I really, really want promotion this year.

Maximum concentration is required for every game from now on. I’m itching to see what life will be like for me in Division 1 of this Superleague.