The middle of season 2016 has rolled around—where does all the time go?—and just like last year I’ve kept my virtual chequebook in my pocket. I don’t want or need any new players. Who would I get? What would I do with them? I suppose Kaka might still have something to offer at whatever age he is now (I haven’t even looked), but is he really going to do anything for my team that the likes of Yamada, Del Piero, Camacho, and even Dos Santos can’t already do? No, he’s not.

So I’ll just wait for Kaka (and Rooney, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, et al) to be reborn as Regens. I’ll get them then. Developing them myself will be more satisfying anyway.

By the time that happens, I hope I’ll have a Treble or two under my belt. But is it going to happen this season? The two Cups can take care of themselves (I’m still in both), but the League is the big one—and after game 15, heading into the four-week mid-season break, my record was Won 9, Drawn 3, Lost 3. After Osasuna beat me for the second time, I lost the final game before the mid-season.

This time my vanquishers were the mighty Levante. I’ve got no complaints about this game. Levante didn’t really play stupendously well, but they didn’t have to. They took advantage of an extremely sluggish human player, namely me…

Now this is something that I’ve not yet touched on in the blog. I might give the impression that I always play PES with an intense, fevered excitement, with a kind of laser-like focus—and sometimes I do play PES that way. During the first weeks of a PES year in particular, that full-on absorption is ramped up to the maximum. (On the first day of a PES year, once I get the new, cellophane-wrapped PES game in my hand, I spend the whole day shaking with excitement. Nobody can approach within ten yards of me for fear of all their hair standing on end. People with pacemakers know not to come calling on PES day. )

Once things settle down I play PES quite casually most of the time. I still play with enjoyment and immersion (you can’t do anything every day unless you enjoy it), but often with a kind of drifting attention, my mind flying to other things. When a big game comes along in Master League I raise my levels of focus, but overall I’d say my default state of playing PES is with about 75% of the concentration levels that I have for those big games.

Sometimes that focus drops below 75%—quite often, below 50%. It’s unavoidable. If I have something else going on in my life, or if I’m pushed for time and shouldn’t really be playing at all, I’ll play a few games with a kind of nervous, fidgety style that really isn’t conducive to good play. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I’ve always been an average PES player, along with my relatively low skill at the game (I don’t dribble in PES because I don’t know how to—next-gen PES excepted, but hey, even my grandmother could dribble in next-gen PES2008 and score amazing, Maradona-esque goals for fun, and she’s been dead for 20 years).

So Levante happened to ‘get me’ in every sense when I was in one of my down cycles on the old concentration-and-focus front. They beat me pretty handsomely, scoring 3 nice goals to my 1 scruffy goal. All of which gave me that disappointing 9-3-3 record going into the mid-season.

It makes the league table very interesting. Valencia are starting to pull away at the top. They remain unbeaten all season. I’m in fourth place, seven points behind them. It’s entirely possible that I might yet again miss out on the Treble this year. Assuming I win all 15 of my remaining games (that won’t happen, but let’s just say that it does), they can afford to lose two games and still win the League. I’d feel a lot better about my chances if I was in second place rather than fourth place. It feels as if there are too many teams jostling for the privilege of trying to catch Valencia. My next game is against another member of the chasing pack: this season’s surprise package, Atletico Madrid. I’d better start winning. A bit of focus wouldn’t do any harm.

As ever, Sunday is other football game day on PES Chronicles. Except… apart from a token few matches on next-gen FIFA08, I haven’t really played any other football games this week.

I’m currently going through a dark time with next-gen PES2008. It turns out that my draconian House Rules (well, I think they’re draconian) might not be tough enough. Once again I find myself more or less going through the motions in far too many games. This might be down to me being very busy with other stuff away from PES over the past week or so. I’ve got a few days off work next week so I’ll see how the leisure time affects my play.

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Dagenham & Redbridge are near the top of Coca Cola League 2 in my second next-gen FIFA08 manager mode career. Playing this game so infrequently nowadays means that I’m struggling to do anything except draw 0-0 or 1-1. My previous two games were both 0-0, then it looked like the last game of the session was going to end 1-1. Not good enough really, and it was all going to cost me in the end. If I slipped down to fourth place and missed out on promotion I’d probably quit the entire manager mode career and go back to my Coventry City galacticos.

Ah, but in the last minute of stoppage time, Huckerby popped up in the box:

A fine looping header over the keeper. I know that I keep saying it about FIFA08, but this goal was another rarity. Most of my headers fly past the post or over the bar for no apparent reason. Did the game want me to score that goal? Are football video gamers amongst the most paranoid people on earth?

Apart from these three games on FIFA08, I haven’t touched any other football game.

I’m still waiting to get a new PC on which to play Football Manager 2008. That’ll be sometime in the summer.

I’ve still to play LMA Manager 2007 on the Xbox360. Maybe I’ll give that a whirl sometime this week.

Sensible Soccer might as well not exist for me. It was the most pointless £7 (or whatever it was) that I’ve ever spent on a game. I’m sure Sensi is a lot of fun for its dedicated fans, but as I said a few weeks ago I missed out on the game the first time around—in the mid-90s—and it’s possibly too late for me to get into it now. I will definitely give it another try for at least a couple of continuous hours. (So far I’ve only managed short bursts of twenty minutes here, half an hour there.) That will be the last test. Sensible Soccer is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. At least it won’t be short of company at the bar…

Maybe I’ll finally lose my patience with next-gen PES2008 and admit defeat and just get the vastly superior (it now seems clear) PS2 version. I know that at least one reader of this blog will be nodding and thinking I told him so…

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.