It’s not all doom and gloom. After the disaster of being eliminated from the Division 1 Cup by Barcelona and losing my grip on the Treble, and then compounding this disaster by losing my first league game of the season to end my unbeaten run—the only saving grace of which was that Real Madrid, my closest league challengers, also lost their corresponding game—[deep intake of breath] it was time to shake off the disappointment and get back to business.

I still have a European Title and a League Title to win. So far it’s been a trophyless Master League career (the Division 2 title doesn’t really count). I’ve got to change that within the next few games.

The Treble isn’t the be-all and end-all of Master League. It’s just something to aim for, a kind of pilot star. To me Master League is all about the stories and experiences that are generated through the season-by-season playing of games, the steady build-up of a great squad, and the development of young players.

Just before the European Cup final I played a couple of league fixtures and won them both easily. Yes, concentration and focus are both back in town. I’d wobbled after the Barca game and allowed Osasuna to beat me while I was still replaying the Cup game in my head. I wasn’t playing in the here-and-now.

I put a stop to that and knuckled down to maintain my lead at the top of the table. Now, with just two league games left in season 2015, I’m 4 points clear of Real Madrid in second place. This title is mine to lose. My last two games are against Villarreal and Real Mallorca. One more win guarantees me the Championship, regardless of whatever Madrid do. I think I’m a certainty to beat one of those teams. Hopefully these won’t be infamous last words…

Before settling the league, there was the small matter of the European Championships, aka the Champions League. So far this competition has been all plain sailing. I whizzed through the group stage virtually unopposed. I hardly broke a sweat in dismissing my knockout opponents. And so to the Final.

It was against Valencia. I was in a state of high alert, guarding against any sign of complacency and loss of focus. Valencia, as I have written before, have consistently been the toughest team for me to beat domestically—far more so than Barcelona and Real Madrid. Valencia pipped me to the league title in season 2014 and have been a nusiance this season as well. Playing them in the European Cup final was not a happy prospect.

And it was a tight game, tighter than the proverbial nun’s crotch. (Poor old proverbial nun…) Heading past the 80th minute I was convinced it was going to extra time, and possibly to penalties. I hoped not. I hate extra time in PES. I only ever play ten-minute matches and if the CPU scores then there’s never really enough time to come back. Also, I loathe penalties in PES—always have done. More than any other aspect of the game, I feel completely helpless. There’s no rhyme or reason why some players will blast their kicks over the bar, or have them saved. There’s no skill involved. It really is five coin-tosses in a row, with the whole match awarded to whoever wins the most coin-tosses. At least FIFA tries to incorporate a skill element to their penalties. Hopefully this is something Konami and Seabass (curse every last one of them, and the horses they rode in on: damn them, damn them all to hell) are working on and will resolve for PES2009 and beyond.

But this match didn’t go to extra time or penalties. I had a throw-in on the right and threw it to Bradley. I ran him a little way across the pitch and, about 25 yards out, from a pretty acute angle that he’s never scored from before, I let a shot fly… It went in. 1-0 to me, and all I had to do was hold off Valencia for a few more game minutes. My very first PES2008 trophy was imminent!

I survived those last few minutes, and impatiently pressed START to get to the presentation ceremony and celebrations. I was playing this session on the PSP. I held the little screen very close to me, wanting to savour every moment. As I watched the blank LOADING screen I felt very excited. About thirty seconds passed. It was taking its time, this celebration cutscene, but that was the PSP for you—why didn’t Sony go with solid state cartridges, just this once? Another thirty seconds passed. Hmmm. I was getting worried. The UMD wasn’t making any noise. If it was still loading, as the screen claimed it was, surely it’d be grinding away back there? It was totally silent.

I’ll cut to the chase: I had to reset my PSP and then play the European Cup final against Valencia all over again. It was annoying, but at least if I lost I’d be fully entitled to reload and play it again. As it turned out I won the final again on my first attempt. The game was spookily similar to the first one, except this time the score was 1-1 at 80 minutes, and then I got my winner. Bradley scored it again, fittingly.

And that was that. I’ve won the European Championship. Now for the league.

After taking on Chelsea on the opening day and beating them comfortably, I had another Championship six-pointer against Manchester United. This one went against me.

I was the away side. It was 0-2 to me before half an hour was over. Then Man Yoo switched on their razzle-dazzle, and my players wilted like men of straw.

The manner of the defeat rocked me back on my heels even further than the setbacks in the European Cup. I had my full First XI out. The players were mainly fully-fit and in good form (orange and red arrows all round). I started well, sure: two good goals from Schwarz and Beerens. But then I was steamrollered in the second half.

In the next league match I ‘only’ managed to draw against Liverpool. I was looking for the win - pretty desperately looking for it - and nearly threw the point away whilst doing so. In PES2008, the CPU teams are at their most dangerous on the counter-attack. This is particularly true following a corner against them. Liverpool almost won the game several times in that way. At the end I felt lucky not to have lost badly.

I’ve fallen to my lowest league position for two seasons. The wheels haven’t come off my league campaign just yet. But they are wobbling slightly. It’s far too early to run a warm bath and break out the razor blades, but it’s affecting my confidence, and in turn my performances.

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The Treble, though, is still on. Just.

The second leg of the D1 Cup first round tie against Newcastle was the most amazing, incredible, nerve-wracking match I have yet played on PES2008.

I lost the first leg 2-3 at home, remember, and approached the second leg with a certain feeling of Doom. This feeling was not alleviated when Newcastle quickly went into a 2-0 lead, as I again panickily raced around the pitch trying to get myself five goals in the first ten minutes or something.

That would seem to have been that as far as the pesky Treble was concerned. It was all over. Wasn’t it?

No. Not quite yet. I got one back before half time. Beerens, my pre-season signing, has been pretty damn good for me so far. He’s got a couple of goals in the league. He played in this cup match, and I scored with him before half time to give me a slender hope. 2-1.

It was still 5-3 on aggregate to Newcastle. I needed two goals just to get to extra time.

In the second half I pulled out all the stops, and had chance after chance. Newcastle counter-attacked dangerously. I lived on the edge at the back as I threw everything forward. Alan Smith raced clear around the 60th minute. Bramble was nearby, just behind and to the side. I sprinted him across as best I could (‘Bramble’ and ’sprinting’ do not sit well together). I thought I had the angle and the positioning to execute a slide tackle. So I did. But I missed the ball and brought down Smith when he would have been clean through. Red card for Bramble, and I was down to ten men.

I still felt I had a chance. I’ve won games easily before with ten men. Never mind that this was Newcastle in the Cup. I could do it. I rejigged my formation. Instead of bringing off a striker for a defender, I rearranged the remaining three defenders into a classic back three and just went for it with a 3-3-3. I got my reward soon after with a goal from Andy Cole. 2-2! But there were only ten minutes of the game left…

Then I only went and made things even harder for myself by getting another player sent off. Bradley this time. I slid in on a Newcastle player in midfield as I was trying desperately to get the ball back, and the resulting foul was deemed a red card offence. Curse you Seabass!

I didn’t bother trying to rearrange my formation this time. To hell with it. 3-2-3 or bust.

By the 90th minute I had more or less given up. I was already preparing my brave face for this here blog. Then a loose ball broke to Beerens on the edge of the box and I took a shot… Goal.

2-3 to me, a mirror image of the first leg scoreline. With the last kick of the 90 minutes. Somehow, I had clawed my way back. Don’t ask me how. It felt more than a little odd at the time. If the game was scripted in my favour, so what. I was too busy punching the air. Bless you Seabass…

In extra time, I was more cautious with my play. I took off a striker and rearranged my defence into an orthodox back four. I pulled my two midfielders back as deep as they could go. I left my strikers up front, hoping to pick up scraps. I was by no means settling for a penalty shootout. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t concede again. I’d rather go out on penalties than go out by conceding a soft goal after all my efforts to get back into the tie.

Extra time was tough. It was a grim battle against fatigue and error, my players’ and my own (this was all taking place at 3 a.m. in the real world). Newcastle pressed constantly but somehow never quite got through. Whenever I got the ball I had few outlets up front or in midfield. The ball always came right back at me. I carved out a few opportunities but missed them all. So, fortunately, did Newcastle.

Penalties. I scored all five of mine. Newcastle missed one of theirs. I was through to the next round.

It felt good.

I know. The coin-toss of a penalty shootout happened to go my way instead of the CPU’s way. I’ve seen my players in penalty shootouts on PES blaze the ball high over the bar or at a post for no real reason too many times to believe that there was any actual skill involved on my part. I was just happy to be through.

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For the Treble to be still on, I had to win all three of my remaining games in the European Championships qualifying group. I’d lost two and drawn one of the opening ties. I was bottom of the group.

Here in stoppage time at the end of a somewhat overlong post (that Newcastle game was just epic), I’ll keep it short, sweet, and simple: I took on Marseille at home and trounced them 4-1. This was on the back of the D1 Cup result. I was on a high. I went into the Marseille game knowing I could and should and would win it easily. And I did.

The qualifying group table still makes for uncomfortable viewing. It’s very disappointing to be bottom with two games to go. But those points totals next to the teams’ names are bunching up nicely.

What would any blog be without a Top 10 Tips For Eternal Greatness type of post? All the blog tipsters recommend it - usually in a Top 10 list of blog tips, the scamps.

When I was a very small boy indeed, one of my favourite TV shows was a gameshow called Play Your Cards Right. At the start of every show the host, Bruce Forsyth, welcomed the studio audience by saying, and I quote: “What a wonderful audience! [pause...] You’re so much better than last week’s…”

It always provoked a near-hysterical bout of laughter from the studio audience. I was laughing too, although I didn’t really know why it was funny. When I found out why the audience was laughing, I could never watch television in the same way again…

(This is heading somewhere PES2009-related, don’t worry.)

The audience laughed because it was (most of the time) the exact same audience from’ last week’. There was no last week. Up to 6 episodes of the show were filmed every day over a week or two.

It’s much the same in the world of video games franchises that are updated on an annual basis. I am not about to claim that every version of PES from PES1 through to PES2014 have all been secretly pre-programmed at an abandoned aircraft hangar in the Nevada desert or anything like that (insert PES2008 gag here). But I do believe that the development cycle for each PES starts and finishes a lot earlier than is generally supposed.

It’s probable that the features to be included in PES2009 are either already finalised, or very close to being finalised. This would seem to have been confirmed by Seabass himself. Responding to unprecedented criticisms of PES2008, he stated that PES2010 would see a return to the PES drawing board. It’s already too late for PES2009. Probably.

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Here, in no particular order of importance, are 10 things I’d like to see in PES2009. They’re very individual to me, and many of them are only ‘niggles’ - not major problems at all, and therefore things that can easily be fixed without breaking the whole game. Right?

The list is accompanied by several bandwidth-hungry JPEGs to make things look pretty and make you forget that you’re reading on the internet and stuff.

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1. Master League#1: End the silly feature where you cannot have a player on the Transfer List and use him in a Trade negotiation at the same time. It’s so annoying.

2. Master League#2: At least three Divisions are needed for Master League. A twelve-club Division 3, and twenty clubs in Divisions 1 and 2. Hell, go the whole hog and make it a four-division structure. It wouldn’t be hard. ML players would love it. ML haters are going to hate ML again anyway, so what is there to lose?

3. Editing: An editor on a par with the PS2 versions’ editors. If this isn’t already planned for PES2009, then Konami are even closer to committing professional suicide than they already did with PES2008. And I say this as somebody who doesn’t really care about editing. If I can change kit colours and proper names, I’m happy enough. But others do care - boy, do they care.

4. Graphics: A level of graphical sheen and prowess appropriate for the next-gen consoles. That’s all. If EA can do it, Konami can do it. (Incidentally, how long are the next-gen consoles going to go on being called next-gen consoles? It’s the kind of thing that annoys me, and it annoys me.)

5. Penalty kicks: For the love of all that’s holy, please bring in a power bar for the kicker at the very least. Online wags have rightly compared PES penalties to a web Flash game circa 2003. Come on. They’re an embarrassment.

6. Fix the side-backs. In real life they don’t wander into the CB positions at the most critical moments for no apparent reason. If this is an example of Konami’s infamous scripting, well, they should come up with another script that doesn’t rub our noses in it quite so much. Speaking of which…

7. Scripting: We know it exists. They know that we know it exists. We know that they know that we know - etc. What’s needed for PES2009 is a bit of honesty and openness from its makers about just what is going on under the hood.

It’s not asking for much. Plenty of other computer games inform their players of what to expect on higher difficulty levels.

The Civilization series is a notable example. Going into a game on Deity level, say, you know exactly what bonuses the AI players are receiving. They can build faster than you. They can make war better than you. They can make money quicker than you. You know exactly how and why you’re about to get your arse kicked unless you do something about it. It’s not shrouded in mystery and plausible deniability.

I’d settle for a nice section in the sparkling new PES2009 manual that details the exact effects on the human and computer teams of the varying skill levels. For example: “If you choose to play on Top Player, the CPU team receives a +10 bonus to all of its stats across the board.” That kind of thing.

8. Online play: There’s no squirming out of this one for Konami. I don’t play online (not much, anyway), but billions do. When they do do it, they want to experience the ‘online is the same as offline’ standard of play that was so (in)famously promised for PES2008. Along with a proper Editor, this is another must-have. Everything is moving online. I’m resolutely a solo gamer but even I can see which way the wind is blowing. In 10 years’ time, games like Warhawk (no single-player mode; 100% online) will be the norm.

9. Foot planting. The good people over at WENB do keep going on about something they call ‘foot planting’. I have only the vaguest idea what they mean, but this does not stop me from enthusiastically endorsing it.

10. Camera panning. To be clear: camera panning in PES is where the camera is anchored near the halfway line at a point of your choosing. As the action moves from end to end, the camera pans to follow the action - instead of tracking up and down the sideline, as it does in PES2008. I’ve got to add this to the list of must-haves. Of all the things that I miss in PES2008, the absence of camera panning is one of the most dismaying.

AND FINALLY:

“Mr Seabass, don’t make me angry”

Don’t you dare release PES2009 until it is fully finished. Don’t even think about it. That would be most unpleasant.