It’s been a long old journey from then to now. Not as long as my journeys in previous PES years. (PES2008 will always suffer in comparison to its previous selves.) But it’s been long enough.

I sleepwalked through what was left of the League: West Ham 0, Coventry City 5. Andy Cole got 4 goals in this game.

Manchester United finally lost one, meaning that a win in my next fixture would seal the Championship title.

That next fixture was against my forthcoming D1 Cup Final opponents, Aston Villa. (This often happens in PES. Especially in the early stages of a season. With two-legged cup ties, sometimes you can end up playing the same opponents three times in a row.)

I beat Aston Villa 5-3, and took the title. Here’s Captain Schwarz leading the celebrations:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fVYYWDWLYI&rel=1]

It was the easiest League title I have ever won on any instalment of PES. Still, it was my first title in PES2008. This season was memorable for many good reasons. It would be churlish of me to grumble any more now (there’s plenty of time left until PES2009 for that.)

The only thing left to go for in the League was a goal difference of +100 or more. (Schwarz, with 29 goals, was already the runaway Golden Boot winner.)

I beat Galatasaray 5-2. Orellano got a hat trick, playing in the centre CF slot in place of Schwarz, who has been blue- or grey-arrowed for almost every game lately.

The final league game was against Bolton. I went into it with a goal difference of +99. Easy, right?

Well, once again I tried too hard. I found myself 0-1 down and with just 9 players by the middle of the second half. No problem. This is PES2008, after all. I scored two late goals with my 9 men and won 2-1, taking me to a goal difference of exactly +100 in the final table.

My final goals scored tally was 136. One hundred and thirty-six. In one season. Ridiculous.

Here’s a full list of my team’s goal-scoring/assists performance this season:

(The discrepancy of 4 goals is made up for by CPU own goals, and one or two goals that Bramble got before I traded him mid-season.)

As can be inferred from the list, I’ve been less than dutiful in reporting just how effective Shimizu and Andy Cole have been for me up front this season. Some of my Schwarz-centric posts might have suggested that Coventry City was a one-man team. Not so.

Andy Cole in particular deserves a special mention. He’s another player I don’t think I’ve seen the best of, despite his 15 goals this season. Along with Beerens, I’ll be allowing myself to get him again next time around. Schwarz and Shimizu definitely won’t be allowed.

Final position: 1st (103 pts)
Won:33 Drew:4 Lost:1
Goals scored:136 Goals conceded:36 Goal difference:+100
Yellow cards: 34 Red cards: 6

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The Division 1 Cup Final against Aston Villa was a peculiar game. Villa took the lead, I equalised. Villa equalised, I took the lead again. Then Villa took the lead. It was 3-2 to them going into half time. I was frustrated and more than a little tense. With the Treble apparently sitting on a plate begging to be eaten, I was in danger of throwing it away.

I shouldn’t have worried, though. I scored three goals in the second half and won the Cup 5-3 (the exact same score of my League title decider against Villa). The pick of the goals was this peach of a strike from Beerens:

I do love a goal that finds the postage stamp corner of the net. This one was achieved with a minimum of backlift, which always makes a player’s technique stats shine through.

I only got to play with Beerens for this one season. He’s still only 24. In my next Master League I’m banning myself from having all but a few players that I’ve had in this career. Beerens will be one of the exceptions.

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After all of the fireworks in the League and D1 Cup, the ECC Final against Barcelona was relatively anti-climactic. I was nervous going into the game, and once again I conceded an early goal.

The amount of early goals conceded in big games is extremely dubious. It could be a result of being a little more uptight than usual, and playing in a withdrawn, over-careful manner; or it could just be PES’s pesky scripting; or it could be a mixture of the two. Or it could be something else. Coincidence, maybe. There sure are a lot of coincidences in PES2008…

I chose to man-mark Ronaldinho with Bradley in this game (I never usually bother with man-marking), and the buck-toothed wonderboy was pretty anonymous throughout, despite me rarely seeing Bradley within so much as 5 yards of him, all game.

I held firm against Barcelona’s persistent pressure. I got my equaliser with Bradley scuffing a shot over the line during a goal-mouth scramble.

I got the winner with Reyes toward the end. 2-1 to me. And that was that.

The Treble was in the bag. I had fought a war on three fronts throughout a long, long season, and been victorious on all of them.

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It was difficult to progress in the Cups on one or two occasions. The absence of Italian clubs in Europe takes the gloss off winning the ECC. The League took its time to ripen and fall into my lap, thanks to Man Yoo’s peculiar reluctance to lose any of their games.

But it was all just too easy, in the final analysis.

The reasons why it was too easy have been gone over again and again (and again) here and on dozens of other PES-focused sites. Goalkeepers have emerged as the #1 reason why there are so many goals in next-gen PES2008. The keepers in the game are broken.

There is also the matter of player pace. In years gone by, your players’ pace and acceleration stats meant next to nothing. The slowest CPU team defender could catch the quickest human team player. We complained and griped and grumbled about it for so long that they finally caved in. The result? Every player is a potential Maradona. This is a tough one to criticise Seabass & co. for. What he/they should have done was to find a way to make CPU defensive AI a lot better.

But this is not the place for a PES2008 post-mortem. Not now.

There’s life in the old dog yet. I’ll say it again: the core PES gameplay of next-gen PES2008 is as good as it’s ever been. (In my opinion. Other opinions differ.)

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Here’s the download link to my final saved game file: PS3.zip

WARNING! Transferring this game save to your PS3 will overwrite any ML save of your own that’s called Master League 03. Proceed with caution.

Any PS3-owner with a USB stick who’s curious to see my players and check out my season-by-season record is welcome to do so. Anyone who might want to pick up where I left off and play on is also welcome to do so.

The save file will place you in week 1 of negotiations at the end of season 2012, with the squad that won the Treble.

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NEXT on peschronicles: next-gen FIFA08 week.

I said I was going to do it. And now I’m going to go ahead and do it.

I could do with a break from PES2008 (familiarity breeds you-know-what). I have a lot of unfinished business to deal with in FIFA08.

PES vs. FIFA is an ongoing (and largely dull) debate.

Until this year (or arguably last year, with FIFA07) PES vs. FIFA was a no-brainer. PES was the thougtful, mature, simulation-oriented football game for mature gamers of all ages. FIFA was the arcadey, pass-pass-shoot game for kids of all ages. There was little or no argument to be had. PES all the way.

Well. In retrospect, PES-lovers can see that our unshakeable confidence in the franchise was unrealistic. Next-gen FIFA08 is the first serious challenger to PES ever.

Over the next seven days I’ll be talking about my progress with FIFA08. I’ll discuss its gameplay specifically in relation to the PES series and to PES2008 in particular. I’ll be treating FIFA08 as a game in its own right (of course), but it’s only natural that much of my attention will be through PES-tinted spectacles.

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After that it’ll be back to Master League on PES2008. In a Superleague. Starting all over again with the Default players. I can’t wait.

A couple of good games and a nice goal or two always improve the mood. I’m still hovering above the relegation battlezone, but hopefully starting to pull away.

After his inexplicable wander away from the ball at the worst possible moment in the Chelsea game, I dropped Kim U Don’t and put Friedel back in the First XI.

I had another ridiculous game against Newcastle that ended 3-3, with Alan Smith playing like some kind of 1970s-style Brazilian superman throughout. Beware of Newcastle and Michael Owen in PES2008, is all I’ll say. They are licensed, after all…

Next I played Man Utd at home, and they won 2-1. But I was very happy to score a goal that briefly made the score 1-1 in the second half:

Nice set-up pass from Schwarz, and a super strike from Reyes. These kinds of goals, so plentiful in PES6 (a bit too plentiful, really), are hard to come by in PES2008. I like me some first-time shots, I do…

So I won a couple of games, I lost a couple of games, I drew a couple of games. All very ‘first season in the top flight’, really. With no chance of doing anything in the league this season, the Cup is my only way into Europe (and all of those lucrative fixtures).

I took on Copenhagen at home in the second round (had a bye in the first) and won 1-0. Then I drew 1-1 with them at their place. That was one tough game. They were all over me, and scored at the worst possible time: the very start. I’m talking literally 10 seconds into the game. Ouch.

I resisted the inevitable CPU onslaught (you know how it goes by now), and got my goal towards the end of the half.

Folan, starting for the first time in a while, received the ball in the centre-forward position. I noticed Schwarz in a bit of space for once and clipped a neat through-ball over the back line into his path. The defenders were almost upon him when he received the ball. It had to be a first-time shot… and in it flew, past the keeper’s dive, low into the opposite corner of the net. A fine goal, and most importantly an away goal. Not even I could mess up this one, and I didn’t.

Below is a screenshot of one of my player’s current stats.

The player is Schwarz. On the left are his stats back when he joined my club two and a half seasons ago. On the right are his stats now. He has a good many years of continuous development ahead of him yet. It’s almost frightening. All of the youngsters I got in the first and second seasons are starting to come good in a similar way.

So I don’t think I really need to get some great new players during the off-season - but it would be nice.

PES2008’s players’ stamina gauges are frailer than eggshells. They cannot play two full games in succession. Well… they can, but then you lose them for two or more games while their stamina builds up again. You really need at least three players to cover for every position. No wonder the starting squad was so huge this year.

Things got off to a good start in Week 1 of negotiations. An offer came in for Van den Berg. That was a very welcome 2400 points, right there. This boosted my overall points to 26000. My wages at the end of the season would only be 14500 or so. I had lots of points to play with.

Here’s who I got, and why:

KIM U DON (GK, age 17)
Due to those stamina issues, I really need a third goalkeeper in the squad. This Korean youngster is 3 years younger than Friedel but already has better stats than him in every department but one (stamina of course). In addition he shares two key special skills with Friedel: 1-on-1 saves, and Penalty saves. Rather than just lazily looking at the Show All Players and the Openness to Negotiation lists, it’s always worth doing Advanced Searches for players with the exact attributes you want. I searched for a keeper aged 17-26 with the two special skills and a minimum Keeper Skills rating of 80. There were about 30 players who matched the criteria (including my own Friedel). Kim U Don was among them. Yes, a more experienced head would have been preferable, but Friedel at 20, and Ivarov at… whatever age he is, have got the experienced angles covered.

FELIPE (CB, 25)
Not much to say about this one. I traded Valeny for him, paying a couple of thousand points on top. Good stats, good height, good heading ability.

REYES (SS, Age 26)
One of Europe’s brightest real-life stars was sitting on the Unbelonging list, just waiting for a club to come in for him. His abilities actually look a little poor right now, but his development chart shows he still has a ways to go yet. He is primarily an SS, but has alternate positions of AMF and CF. Always handy, that.

CHIESA (SS, 17)
Another worthy name from real life popped up in the Youth list as a regenerated player. I snapped him up in the last negotiation week.

VAN STEENSEL (SB, 26)
I wanted a left-sided SB to replace Ruskin, wonder goals notwithstanding. In the last negotiation week I Advance Searched and found this player. His stamina is pretty poor but in all other respects he’s better than Ruskin. I traded Ruskin for him, paying only 500 points on top.

And that was all - just the four players. I hunted high and low for a great DMF with the precious Middle Shooting ability (or Shooting from Distance as it has been renamed in PES2008).

Mathieu’s club still won’t let me make a bid for him. He’s 27 now. If I don’t get him before he’s 31 or so, it won’t be worth getting him at all - I’d wait for him to retire and then reappear as a Regen. But I’ll be trying for a few more negotiation periods yet.

I did find a DMF (with Middle Shooting) called Muntari. I tried to trade Mao Molina plus 7000-odd points for him, but negotiations broke down in the final week, and Muntari went off to Valencia in the end. I left it alone for now. I still have Donadel, who is still playing just great. And Duffy is starting to mature too.

So, on the verge of game 1 in Division 1 - against Arsenal, no less - here’s my full current squad:

From which I have chosen this First XI:

I’d prefer to stick with Friedel in goal, but I want to give Kim U Don a little run to settle him in. And technically he is the better keeper anyway.

I’m going to start with Chiesa on the right up front as often as I can. One thing I have learned about young players is that they’re ultimately worth it.