PES Chronicles

So far, my PES2010 Master League adventure has been notable for the lack of big-name players I’ve been able to acquire for my team. It’s very unlike previous versions of the mode, where you could equip yourself pretty much at will with all the Ronaldos and Platinis and whoever else took your fancy.

Up to this point, starting season 14, my best players have mostly been home-grown, or players that aren’t really household names in real-life. Amir Zaki and Pedro Munitis have been amazing for me. Nakamura has been evergreen from the first season he arrived. He’s currently 28 years old and has just hit the 90 OVR rating mark. My own ‘not-Greg’ created player has been an important midfielder. And I’ve had many, many talents come up from the Youth team and establish themselves—players like Sazi, McCann, Cejumi, and Capuano, to name just a few.

For just one example: CAPUANO. I signed him from the Youth team as a 17-year-old rated around 65 OVR. Look at him now, aged 24. I’ll never sell him. Well, perhaps an offer in the region of £100m would give me something to think about, but for anything less than that, the answer’d be NO. He’s got some growing to do yet. I’m going to retrain him to add AMF to his repertoire of positions. I’ll retool his focus training accordingly and beef up his shooting and dribbling. I’m genuinely excited to see how it all turns out. Will it wreck what he already is? I won’t know unless I try.

Those of us who’ve always played Master League love it for the in-depth immersion and sense of involvement with the team that it brings as part of the overall package. PES2010’s all-new Master League  is delivering on this front in bucketloads. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for me Master League is PES.

Okay, time to stop gushing and get on with season 14. I changed both kits. Home: a dark ‘Croatia-style’ kit. Away: a yellowy ‘Galatasaray-style’ kit.

Once again I’ve had minimal activity in the pre-season transfer market. After wages and costs I had £20,000,000 to play with. I tried again for Scholes, Pirlo, etc., as I have done for the last four or five transfer windows now. But none of them would come to me.

I think it’s a flaw in the otherwise excellent new transfer system that I have no real idea why some players won’t sign. I am left to guess that it’s due to my relatively low club ranking. Currently I’m only 50th in the ML world, and presumably those players want to go somewhere more prestigious. That’s fine. A few Cups, ideally a few Doubles or Trebles, should soon fix that. And it’s not as if I’m aching to get hold of the big names. I’m having possibly my best-ever Master League experience with the players I can get. Who needs Scholes & co.? Not me. (But it would be nice, anyway.)

With nobody signing up, then, I settled for recruiting one new player from the Youth team. GATTUSO is the player in question, and obviously I expect great things from him in the future.

In the League, I navigated my way very carefully indeed through the opening round of the D1 Cup. I’ve been eliminated at this stage two seasons in a row. Maximum focus and concentration. AEK Athens, at home, first leg: beat them 2-0, easily. Second leg was a predictable torrid affair that I always felt I was struggling to maintain any semblance of control in. 0-0 it finished. I am through to the second round for the first time in 3 seasons. The Treble is still on.

Patchy form in the League. Now that I’m pretty much always in the hunt for the title, I’ll stop posting screenshots of the league table in every post until things get interesting near the end of the season. Having a league table picture in every post is a bit much, and largely pointless. I’m currently 5th after 7 matches with a record of W3 D2 L1. One of the victories was a momentous 6-1 drubbing of Spurs, who are still a top side in my ML world, so it was a notable victory indeed. Spurs’ First XI is starting to look very weird—as they all are, really:

In Europe, there’s a familiar look and feel to my Champions League group. The other teams are Juventus, Helsinki, and Rosenborg. I was up against Rosenborg last year, and this is now the third time in four seasons that I’ve faced Juventus in the CL group stage. The campaign hasn’t started very well, either. I was 2-0 up at home against Juve but shipped two late goals to only draw 2-2. That felt bad enough, but then I lost 4-1 away to Rosenborg. Their four goals included this extraordinary own-goal from my defender, Carragher—or was it an own-goal?

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It certainly looked and felt, at the time, like an own goal. My keeper’s non-reaction supports this: his lack of any kind of response is typical of the code not knowing what to do. It happened durng a period of play where I was getting very frustrated, which for me always means lots of clamping and button-mashing. Here I was mashing the slide-tackle button, trying desperately to stop what felt like irresistible AI momentum towards my goal. I saw my power meter charge up just before the kick happened, which makes me think the game deemed Carragher to have the ball under his control for a split second, and this really was an own-goal. But the second replay suggests the AI player’s foot was in there, doing something…

Whatever happened, whoever kicked it, I was very unhappy with my keeper. Zuberbuhler still is a good keeper, overall, but he’s started showing these moments of eccentricity that are costing me. It might really be time for Regen Buffon to claim the No. 1 shirt, or at least occupy it for a while. I’m undecided.

Season 13 of my Master League career. And, hey, look at that: it’s March 1st, 2010. It’s nearly springtime. I’m playing a PES game with a fervour unmatched since the halcyon days of PES5. I still can’t believe it. I consider myself fortunate indeed.

It’s a great football game year, especially with FIFA10 waiting on the sidelines for if/when PES2010 fades. Even if PES2010 doesn’t fade, I might soon take a few days off to play the ‘other game’. This is something I’ve thought about doing a lot recently, as the ML seasons pass. FIFA10 is too good a game, IMO, to allow it to sit for long.

But I probably won’t play FIFA10, even for just a day. Not yet. The time’s not right. I’ve got too much to lose. I don’t want to break Master League’s magic spell. I’m loving PES2010 right now, but how would I feel after experiencing FIFA10’s smooth animations and passing once again?

I will see how I feel at the end of this Master League season. A Treble would provide the perfect opportunity for a natural break. Maybe this season 13 will be the season?

NO. It’s not the season. Once again, I am out of the Division 1 Cup at the first time of asking. I have been defeated in the first round for the second season in a  row. How can I have been so careless?

My opponents were Man Utd. In the first leg at my place I went 0-1 down early on, but fought my way back to a 2-1 win. I felt relieved to have the aggregate lead going into the second leg. I fancied my chances, to be honest. Complacent? Possibly.

That second leg (box score on the right) was an unbelievably tough game. It was also a very fishy game. What I feared more than anything was conceding an early goal, because I knew that was the AI’s perfect scenario: it’d be ahead on the away goal and I’d have to batter at their goal to get anything. They did score early on, and I did batter their goal. But I got nothing. 1-0 it ended, 2-2 on aggregate, and I was out. 62% possession. 18 shots on goal. Out.

Maybe next season, hey? Yes. Maybe next season I’ll win the Treble…

In general news: guess which Regen Default player turned up in my Youth team? None other than The Myth of Castolo. His first Regen appearance was just a few seasons ago. I ignored him back then (I really don’t like Castolo) and he vanished, and that, I understood, was that: goodbye to Castolo, forever. I even wrote at the time, a touch gleefully:

“I won’t see Castolo again until PES2011. That’s fine by me. In fact I almost wish he would reappear, so I could once again have the pleasure of ignoring him.”

Is the game jogging my elbow, saying, “Oh, go on. Please…”?

Okay. I’ll bite. This time, I feel I’ve got time and space for Castolo. I have signed him up and he is part of my squad and part of my plans. I would like to nurse him up to true greatness, or at the very least to being a decent player.

So let Project Castolo commence! He’s particularly rubbish at the moment. I’ll be bringing him on as a sub in safe games, and maybe playing him from the start in any meaningless games that happen along. If he’s not at least a 70 OVR by the time he’s 22, I’ll sell him, and then that really will be the final curtain for me and Castolo.

Here’s my new squad. As well as Castolo I’ve signed Jamie Carragher, aged 18. He cost me £2.5m from his current club. I forget who that was now. Valencia? Dortmund? Isn’t Master League wonderful?

I didn’t buy anyone else. I tried my best for about 5 or 6 players rated above 90. Regen Scholes again—I’m a big Paul Scholes fan in PES as well as the real world. In my ML he’s now 22 and if he doesn’t come to me soon, I’ll stop trying.

I also tried for Pirlo, currently a talented 19-year-old at Inter, and also for Forlan, currently a similarly talented youngster elsewhere. No luck. What will it take to bring truly great players to my team? I really, really need to start winning some cups to go with my leagues…

New home and away kits. Away (right), it’s my first flirtation with a green kit in PES2010, after bad experiences in past PESes where I’ve been unable to see my players properly.

For the home kit (left) I altered the stripes’ colouring to a traditional sky blue and white, and went for white shorts instead of black. I love playing Barbie at the start of every season. Love it. Next season, I fancy going for something a bit different for both kits.

I’m doing well in the league. There’s been a traditional unexpected defeat that I felt helpless to prevent (but probably just defended badly and failed to concentrate properly, in truth). There’s also been a few puzzling, frustrating, 0-0 draws. All intermingled with satisfying, fully rounded matches. This game still does not feel easy to me.

There’s a familiar look to my qualifying group in the Champions League: Juventus, Aberdeen, and Rosenborg. I’ve played Juve and Rosenborg so far and beaten them both 1-0. I’m not going to have any trouble qualifying. But then it’s never the group stages that trouble me in this competition…

The mid-season transfer window in season 12 of my Master League career in PES2010 has come and gone. I had two big AI offers on the table for two of my strikers. Tanaka, my 78-rated journeyman Japanese forward, had been on the transfer list since before the start of the season. Only one offer was submitted for him: £24.3m. He’s a slow WF/SS/CF hybrid who barely gets a game for me nowadays. What was I going to do?

Also on the transfer list was Sazi. At one time he was my main man, the apple of my eye, the essential striker whom I thought I needed to win any match. But he’s been seriously lacking in recent seasons, particularly since I paid £2m to equip him with two extra skill cards. Ever since that time, he’s been a shadow of the player he was before. I have serious doubts as to whether the ability to purchase sill cards for players is a worthwhile feaure of the game, or if it’s just glorified makework.

I would have accepted an offer for Sazi of £4m. The offer that came in for him was £16m. So I would easily recoup the money spent on useless skill cards, and then some.

It was a traditional ML no-brainer on both counts. £42,000,000 for two players who hardly get a game for me nowadays. I sold both of them without any regrets.

As for transfers in, I only managed to bring in one new player. I did keep trying for Raul, Scholes, plus a few other genuinely first-class ML performers, but none of them would come to me. I’m pretty sure my team reputation is still below a certain threshold. There was no new talent worth harvesting in my Youth team.

The one player I brought in was a young goalkeeper, a 75-rated Gianluigi Buffon. I spent £1.5m on him. Currently 18 years old, he’ll take over as my #1 keeper in a season or two. I’ve got no problems with Zuberbuhler at the moment—in fact he’s been pretty impressive. I’m looking a good way ahead to the future, is all. I’ll try to sell Fatecha, now my 3rd-choice keeper, at the end of the season.

This lack of buying means that I am very rich indeed. I’ve got about £60m in the bank. The days of struggling to pay my bills at the end of a season are a long, long way behind me. I’ll start spending it all in the next transfer window—if the game will let me.

It occurs to me that I’ve not yet posted an actual, proper First XI during this whole career so far. Every squad image I’ve shown has been jumbled up. So here it is. The First XI seen in the latest squad list on the left currently is my preferred selection, game after game, as long as all are available. With this line-up I can give any team in the ML world a good game—usually…

After a slump in league form I went on a run of 6 wins out of 7. I am now back up to 2nd place, level on points with Man Utd and just trailing on goal difference. In the current crop of league games I had a thrilling clash with Spurs that I won 2-1 with a fine late winner from Zaki.

Sadly, I have been knocked out of the Champions League in the first knockout round for the second season in a row. It’s the same old story. Once I get to the knockout stages, the difficulty seems to go up another notch or two. Last season I was taken apart by Sochaux. This season my quarter final nemesis was in the form of RC Lens.

In PES2010 such teams as Sochaux and Lens are better than 2009 Barcelona and 1990s Milan and 1970 Brazil and late 70s/early 80s Liverpool all put together and pumped full of amphetamines. I don’t know what it is. Obviously I’m a poor player, so that doesn’t help, but it seems to me that strange things happen in these games. The aggression is turned up to 11. The ‘tangle and snatch’ effect that constantly wrests possession away is turned up to 12. All in all I couldn’t live with them over the two legs. I lost the first leg at their ground 2-0, and I lost the second leg at mine 1-2. A feeble exit. I really will have to do better. A Treble may never happen at this rate.

So all I have left to go for now is the league title. With 14 matches left, I think I’ll do it.

After an extremely dodgy start to season 11, I managed to steady the ship—and now currently things remain on the up-and-up. I’m going for the Treble for the first time in PES2010: League, Cup, European Cup. I think I’ve got a great chance of doing it at the first attempt.

My league form is excellent. I could hardly ask for anything better. 10 wins in a row (in all competitions) earned me a nice PSN Trophy. I’m scoring a lot more goals as well. Those narrow 1-0 wins of last season have started turning onto 2-0 and 3-0 wins. I’m still not scoring as many as I’d like, but at least I’m not far behind most of my top-6 rivals. I’ve yet to start finding things easy, but some things feel a lot more straightforward. I’ve got better players and a bigger squad to move them around in.

I splashed out big in the mid-season transfer window. I brought in 5 new players, increasing my squad size to 27. I spent about £7m in transfer fees—easily my biggest speding spree on the transfer market yet. It was about time I started spending the capital accrued from last season’s title win.

MUNITIS and CHILNAT are both AMF/SS hybrids of the kind that seem so plentiful in PES2010. Munitis in particular is a fine player. He’s totally left-footed, and is already making himself at home on the left side of my attack.

PIRES is a Regen, of course, currently 21 years old. He’s the best player of the 5 newbies. BOANERM is a DMF from the Youth squad. UJFALUSI (Ooh for Lucy, as the PES and FIFA commentators call him) is an 18-year-old Regen as well. I bought him for a million from his CPU team. Money well spent, as I needed CB cover. Ujfalusi is already great, and only going to get better. I think he’ll be an immense player in a few years.

I tried to sign the Regen Paul Scholes from Man Utd, but failed. Obviously my team needs to win a bit more and increase its prestige. Currently we’re ranked 100th in the ML ‘world’. I could do with a better negotiator too..

My dependable forward Itzhaki was the surprise European Footballer of Year winner. Okay then… What criteria decided that? I suppose it’s based on the cold hard statistics of match ratings. Itzhaki is a great player, an essential selection for me when he’s fully fit and in good form. But the best player on the continent? No, not by a very long way. I was bemused by the award, it’s fair to say.

I’m still in the D1 Cup, and I have also qualified for the knockout stages of the Champions League. I won my last 2 matches and finished in 2nd place. My opponents in the Quarter Finals will be FC Sochaux. On paper that should be a walk in the park, but this is PES. They’ll probably play like 1970 Brazil. We’ll see how it goes.

Finally today, a brief goals digest in video form. My favourite of these is the second one, from Zaki. I just love scoring goals like that. Boom. Zaki’s diving header isn’t bad either. Also on show are the first goals for my team from Munitis and Pires. Both came from cleared corners. Pires’s volley scuds along the ground and is a bit of a soft goal, really. But I liked it anyway:

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