Could this be the season? As I suspected would happen, losing most of my Master League squad to the end-of-season attrition of salary payments has actually improved my game. I’m concentrating better and playing better.

Now when I get a 1-0 lead I treat it like a fragile egg that I mustn’t drop. This is my traditionally roundabout way of saying that I’ve started picking up wins. With a squad of 17 players! Who are nearly always knackered! It’s a funny old world.

Here (left) is my full, complete, actual current squad again. I still can’t believe I’m actually trying to play PES2009’s rather tough Master League with this paltry roster of players. I did okay on the PS2/PSP version of PES2008 for half a season with a squad of 16—but that was then and this is now. PES2009 is, rather gratifyingly, a wholly different game.

Of course, I won’t have to survive the whole of this season with 17 players. I just have to make it to mid-season, and then I can pick up some fresh players. And then at the end of the season, if need be, have another mass clear-out. This could become a vicious circle.

What I need to do to break out of the circle is simple: start winning. Winning brings points not just in the league table, but in the bank. And what do points make?

I’ve finally scored a long-range goal in PES2009 worthy of posting on the blog. It’s not the most outrageously spectacular long-range goal ever seen in a PES game. But it’s my first true long-ranger PES2009. It feels really tough to score them this year. Making space for the shot is hard enough. The build-up to this goal is one of the few times I’ve found enough space in midfield to have a reasonable chance of scoring. GAMBINO (my only MIddle Shooting-equipped midfielder) is the triggerman:

I enjoyed it. From this angle and speed it doesn’t look nearly as good as it looked ‘live’. But they never do, do they?

Here’s the surprising current table—I’m doing quite well:

Only scoring 5 goals in 8 games is pretty poor, really. But I’m not conceding many either, crucially. And—I don’t want to be hasty, but I think I may have solved the corner problem. This is where the CPU will almost automatically score itself a goal from a corner kick whenever it needs one. I’ve discovered how to drastically reduce the instances of this. I doubt you could ever completely stop it: some CPU goals are just meant to be. We know it. Seabass knows it. Seabass knows that we know it. And he doesn’t care.

All I do is watch the penalty area just before the kick is taken. A CPU runner will dart around in the box. I follow him with my controlled player and make sure I’m in front of him when the kick comes over. But that’s only half of the equation. I still have to time the jump and header right. It’s no good pressing jump too early and hoping the game will interpret my wishes for me, and jump my defender at the right time. Doing that—pressing too early and letting the game do the work for me—is a bad habit learned way back around PES3, I think. 

Using this method I’ve gone from conceding at about 80% of CPU corners to conceding at about 10% of them. It really does work. Admittedly a large part of this is simply having better players, of course, but the method was also working quite well when I still had the likes of Baumann playing at CB.

Aside from all the sound and fury over FIFA09, and the relative mutedness of PES2009 right now (come on, Konami, pull your corporate finger out), it’s worth mentioning that I’m still playing the PS2/PSP version of PES2008 with great enjoyment. In truth, I mainly play it on my PSP nowadays—there are just too many other great games competing for time in my PS3. But I am still playing it.

I will go on playing my PES2008 Master League career at least until the FIFA09 demo appears in September. Even then I’ll probably still play my ML career, off and on, until PES2009 emerges from hiding in late October. Despite this being a proper annus horribilis for PES fans, I’m strangely just as immersed as ever in my Master League. What can I say. I’ve been used to playing Master League all year for several years now, and old habits die hard.

In season 2021, it’s pretty much business as usual. I’m coming up to the mid-season negotiations. I’m top of the league by 8 points (Valencia, as usual, are chasing me in second place). I’m top of my group in Europe. I’m in the quarter-finals of the Division 1 Cup. Things are looking rosy for another Treble.

Regular readers will know how much I love scoring long-range goals. Blasting one in from 30 yards out just feels so good. For me they’re the best possible kind of goals to score. PES has always done long-range shooting very well, particularly from PES5 onwards. The sheer visceral joy of smacking the ball into the back of the net is one of the greatest pleasures that PES gaming has to offer. (FIFA08’s relative lack of oomph in its long-range shooting is one of my minor quibbles with that game.)

I’ve already scored a contender for ‘most favourite PES long-ranger ever’. That one came from Prieto. No, you really can’t beat having a strong DMF with Middle Shooting in your team. In a recent league game I scored a goal with my regular DMF, Bradley, that was slightly different from the norm. Instead of flying straight and true, with power and swerve, it sort of looped up high and then dipped outrageously behind the stranded keeper and into the net. Here’s the default view:

The strike comes from deep inside the centre circle, a yard or two inside the opposition half. I haven’t got out the tape measure to make it official, but I think that makes it a longer-distance strike than the Prieto effort.

The Big Dipper, as I call this goal, truly lives up to its name when seen from pitch-level. The reverse angle shows the crazy path of the ball very clearly. Initially, it rises like a field-goal attempt in American Football.

I scored this goal while sitting at my desk at work. if you’ve got your speaker volume up, you can hear a ringing telephone in the background. I was ignoring it. I was concentrating on filming the goal replay with my mobile phone. Have people no consideration?

In the few months of PES2008 left to me I will, of course, be trying to better this latest long-ranger. I think it’ll be tough, though. To score from even closer to the halfway line I’d probably have to start pressing shoot whilst still in my half—which the game would interpret as a defensive clearance.

The last few days have been all Bradley, Bradley, Bradley. You’d think it’d be easier for me to just marry him or something. All of this fixation upon Bradley probably gives the impression that he is my Most Valuable Player. He may well be that in the future, but for now he is not. For now, Komol is my top player, the man whom I cannot do without.

Komol started coming good last season, when he scored my greatest PES2008 goal so far, and one of my top 5 PES goals ever.

I love to score long-range goals in PES. Best of all is when it’s a long-range goal that means something.

I hadn’t started at all well up here in Division 1. That’s par for the course, really, for me and Master League—I never get off to a flyer whenever I eventually go up to join the big boys. Every year I read about other PES Master League players getting promotion in season 1, winning the title in season 2, and securing the Treble in season 3—all whilst making love to a beautiful woman, presumably.

Can such stories be true? Or is there really a desperate cabal of 15-year-olds permanently deployed on the internet, persistently laying claim to unlikely gaming feats?

Perhaps there are players good enough at PES to ‘complete’ Master League within three seasons. I’d bet there are players good enough to do it with the Default squad. I’m emphatically not one of those players.

Against Deportivo la Coruna I was heading for yet another 0-0 scoreline. It would have left me with a record of W1 D4 L1 for the season. Not disgraceful. Not relegation form (yet). But hardly the kind of steady mid-table success that I had in mind, and which me and my squad are both now good enough to achieve, realistically.

0-0, then, but ahhhhh… In the 90th minute, Komol collected the ball out wide. And then it happened. One of the best, most satisfying long-rangers I’ve ever scored on PES2008, and yet again one of the finest goals I can remember scoring on any PES, ever.

With some goals, you just feel them. In the pit of your stomach, in the marrow of your bones. I could turn the pretension up to 11 here, but I’ll let the replay speak for itself:

Having three replay angles is a first for me on this blog. I really, really like the goal. Others may disagree, but my mind is made up. I love this goal and I want to marry it. I think I love the fact that it’s a crowded penalty box, and the flight of ball initially takes it up toward outer space before gravity (albeit the virtual, computer game kind) starts to do its job.

There was no time for Deportivo to come back. I picked up a crucial 1-0 win.

Scoring a really big, meaningful long-range goal can be among the most intensely joyful experiences that PES has to offer. Sure, under the same circumstances, stabbing the ball over the line from two yards out in the middle of a goalmouth scramble can be just as important. But is it as satisfying? No, never.