One agreeable side-effect of giving your ML team a stupid name: the opportunity for lots of cheesy puns. Expect that to be the first of many.

————-

When choosing a formation for Singers FC, have I learned the lessons of my previous Master League career?

All those weeks ago, I started with a 4-3-3 for the Default squad and got my arse royally kicked for a couple of seasons. Ziggy Bashmore’s ML guide recommends playing a 4-4-2 or even a 4-5-1 with the Defaults, as the players just can’t cope with anything more attacking that leaves them exposed in midfield.

Have I learned my lesson? Have I hell.

It’s a 4-3-3 all the way, and I’ll take the consequences. I cannot play with any other formation on PES. I am sticking with my strategy button alt formations, though, so I’ll always have the emergency 5-4-1 to fall back on. I think I’ll be falling back on it a lot.

Here’s the formation and First XI that I’m going with this time around - for what it’s worth…

I’m playing this ML on Very Hard difficulty. The players’ stamina is even worse from game to game than it was last time - and it was shockingly bad last time. Thus the team selection in this First XI is ridiculously provisional. Indeed, there’s little point in having a First XI when the team selection is not all about “who do I want to play?” but “who can I play?”

——————–

Here’s how my first five games went:

Singers FC 0-0 Real Zaragoza

A game that I could and should have won. I created good chances and had 65% of possession. I found the Default players to be a lot better than the first time around. They’re still rubbish, but my added experience with PES2008 now enables me to make the most of what ability they do have.

Torino 1-0 Singers FC

Ouch. Another game where I dominated possession but conceded a soft goal and never got a look-in afterwards. Again, the Default players handled pretty well. I was worried that I’d try to play with them as if they were Schwarz et al, but for the moment I’m being very patient and disciplined.We’ll see how long that lasts.

Singers FC 3-1 Spartak Moscow

A great game, where I went 0-1 down but stormed back in the second half, scoring three without reply. Here’s my first two goals scored with Singers FC in this Master League:

Hardly classics. In fact, typical bread and butter goals - and typical PES2008 goals, also, with the Spartak keeper at glaring fault on both occasions. Hmmm. Where’s my copy of PES5 again? Oh, okay. There it is, safe and sound.

Singers FC 1-1 Espanyol

A hard game with an exhausted team against one of the league’s early pace-setters. I was happy with the draw.

Singers FC 0-2 Celtic

It had to happen. Celtic thrashed me at home. I say thrashed because a thrashing is what it was. It could have ended 0-5, easily. This was despite me again having the lion’s share of possession: 63%.

All of which leaves me in a respectable 15th position. I say respectable only because I was fully expecting to be rock bottom about now. If I can hold my discipline and grind out results, and if I’m in or around the mid-table area when mid-season negotiations arrive, and if I can pick up a couple of good players - then, who knows, a promotion challenge in my first season might be on the cards.

Plenty of other PES gamers have claimed they got promoted in their first ML seasons on Top Player with the Default squad, but I always assumed they were lying. We’ll see.

Ahhh, Europe. Continent of style, culture - and regular, world-engulfing, armed conflicts (we’re long overdue the next one). Europe is also home to a couple of other remarkable things: the greatest club football teams on Earth, and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Struggling against Chelsea and Real Madrid in my quest for the PES2008 Treble, I found myself calling to mind one of Eurovision’s most memorable tunes.The nature of the battle just seemed so evocative somehow.

In the League, there is no struggle: it’s a question of when, not if I win it. The two Cups are more delicately poised, as only Cup competitions can be.

———-

After drawing 2-2 away against Chelsea in the first leg of the D1 Cup semi-final, I was happy enough. Two away goals are nothing to be sniffed at. I went into the return leg completely confident of victory. This is a dangerous mindset to be in. Sometimes, even PES2008 will creep up and mug you when you go into a match thinking you only have to turn up to win it. I’ve come a cropper once or twice.

But I approached the second leg in the right frame of mind: fully concentrated and with a grim purpose. Now that I’ve decided to restart Master League once this season is over, I’m even more focused on winning the Treble.

I beat Chelsea 3-0 at my ground, winning the semi final 5-2 on aggregate.

It was not as straightforward as it sounds. I had to wait a long time for my first goal. Chelsea probed and harried. I had little time on the ball, and created no clear-cut chances. Chelsea missed a couple of good opportunities. As half-time approached I felt myself getting tense. While it was 0-0 there was always the chance they’d sneak a goal. I wanted a goal for myself to give me some insurance.

Then I got it. Traore collected the ball in the centre of midfield. I went off on a run, evaded a couple of defenders, then let one rip. It struck the far post and bounced across the goal, dropping inside the net on the other side:

I exhaled with relief. Now I was certain of the win. I killed off the match with two more quick goals.

So I am through to the Division 1 Cup Final. There I will play… Aston Villa. How very exciting.

————-

In the second leg of the European Cup semi final I was a lot less confident of progress. In the first leg I’d allowed Real Madrid to score two away goals at my ground. I did get two goals of my own to make it 2-2, but it still meant I had to score at Real Madrid’s place or crash out of the tournament, and thus fail at the Treble, and thus be unhappy.

Real Madrid impressed me a lot in the first leg. They played probably the best that any CPU team has played against me in PES2008.

They started just as impressively in the second leg. Their left back, Drenthe, is not only big and strong (more like a CB than a SB), he is also very quick and very deadly with crosses. He raced down my wing after about ten minutes and hoisted a ball into the box. There was Raul to nod home, making it 1-0 to Madrid on the night.

Oh, crap.

Still, I’d known that I’d have to score at least once in this game to win it. Now I had to score at least twice. Pesky away goals. Who invented them?

As the half wore on it looked as if it wasn’t going to be my night. I just had that feeling. The feeling you get from a PES match when everything is an ordeal. Simple passes that go astray; shots that scream miles over the bar, or straight down the keeper’s throat; tackles that miss completely or leave the opposition player flat on the ground as the referee reaches for his pocket.

I made it to half time with the score still at 1-0. Football is a game of two halves…

I got a goal soon after the break. I broke up yet another raid by Drenthe down my right side. (Note to self: must check out Drenthe at some point in Master League 2.0) He was out of position, and I lofted a delicious aerial through-ball over the top to Shimizu. The little fella’s jet-heeled boots left the Madrid defence trailing a long way behind. I was one-on-one with Casillas. Could I do it?

Yep, I could do it. Shimizu dinked the ball past the keeper. 1-1 on the night. 3-3 on aggregate. Madrid still had that one extra away goal. I needed another goal.

It didn’t look as if it was going to come. By the 80th minute, that awful feeling I mentioned earlier was a full-on conviction that this was it, the Treble was over, it was not meant to be, et cetera.

Duffy had come on for the exhausted Guimaraes, who had been chasing Drenthe up and down the pitch all night. I got the ball with Duffy near the halfway line, and went off on a little run toward Madrid’s net….

Goal! The magnificent Beerens strikes again. That’s about 20 goals for him in all competitions this season so far. At the point where Duffy breaks into the Madrid penalty area, I was a hair’s-breadth away from pressing Shoot, but thought better of it and passed to Beerens. I’m glad I did.

1-2 to me, and that’s how it ended. Real Madrid pressed ineffectually in the last few minutes. I wasn’t taking any chances. It was time to park a bus in in my penalty area. I pressed L2+Triangle to switch to my ultra-defensive 5-4-1, and kept it like that. The final whistle went. I was through.

I’ll play Barcelona in the final. Should be easy…

———–

In the League I’ve continued to win matches with scorelines like 6-3, 4-0, 3-1, 5-2, etc. I’m seven points clear with four games to play.

Another win or two will secure the title. A final goal difference of +100 - or more - should be achievable too.

I’m about to play two Cup Finals. Two wins in those games, and the Treble is mine.

This time tomorrow, one way or the other, it’ll all be over.

Guimaraes has got to the stage where he is no longer merely a promising young player - he’s arrived as a fully-fledged star player. Defensively I have no complaints about him at all. Not much gets past him now that his stats have been beefed up by several seasons’ solid play. Going forward, he’s a proper Roberto Carlos (without those mostly anticlimactic free kicks).

Here’s a great long-range goal from Guimaraes in a 6-1 rout of Everton:

I think that’s the longest long-ranger I’ve scored yet in PES2008. I’d be delighted with it if only it was placed higher up in the net. In PES there’s nothing quite like a long-distance, high, curling, dipping, screamer of a goal. This Guimaraes goal is good, but I dislike how low down it is. It’s almost a daisycutter. Keepers should never be beaten by long-range daisycutters. The dreadful state of the goalkeepers in PES2008 should never have got past Konami’s first playtest phase - if there even was a playtest phase, of course…

Schwarz scored four of the other goals. He’s neck-and-neck with Rooney for the Golden Boot at the moment.

Schwarz is now so prolific that I expect him to bag at least a hat trick in every game. He certainly gets the chances to do it. It’s a rare game where I don’t create at least five good chances for him, and usually more.

When I’m in the groove - concentrating fully, no distractions, not thinking of anything else but the game - a 4-3-3 with a good squad of players is pretty much unstoppable.

This is something I found the other night when I played online for the first time. Setting aside the horrific technical problems that marred all but one or two of the games, I was more than able to hold my own.

When I left the formations in their default states - usually a standard 4-4-2 or 4-5-1 - I struggled to create openings up front. But whenever I took a minute beforehand to rearrange the players into my beloved 4-3-3 with a deep DMF, I was a danger. The only thing I had to watch out for was the counter-attack - and I paid the price more than once. Somebody playing as Brazil (I was Argentina) completely destroyed me 3-0, my heaviest defeat of the session.

When the lag and out of sync problems weren’t effectively wrecking any kind of gameplay on the pitch, I had an enjoyable time. Playing against ‘people’ made a refreshing change from playing the AI. I suspect that PES2008 gameplay has been optimised with online in mind. (A possible reason why the single-player game feels curiously easy, and a bit flat, this year.)

Online could be where PES2008 finds its longevity - which makes it all the more urgent that Konami knuckles down and gets it sorted out. Online play is definitely something I’d want to return to in the future. As things stand, I won’t be going near the online game again until I hear that it has been sorted - or until I finally crack and get an Xbox360. As well as the 360’s relatively flawless PES2008, other games like Bioshock and Mass Effect are starting to tempt me.

Getting back to my Master League, the only time I feel in real danger now is when a fast, determined CPU team collects the ball after one of my attacks and sweeps down to my end. This is where my alt 5-4-1 formation (mapped to a strategy button) has come in very handy. Switching between my starting 4-3-3 and the alt 5-4-1, and back again, is a press of two buttons away. It drags my players by the scruff of their necks back to defend in depth and in numbers, snuffing out the counter.

I’ve also spent some time tinkering with my other alt formation - the ultra-attacking 1-2-4-3, mapped to L2+Square. That formation was really only good for one thing: extreme attacking play in the final third. Losing the ball was a nightmare. There was no way my forward players (i.e. nearly all of them) could ever get back in time.

So I’ve amended it to an attacking formation that I can actually play with for some time. One that reduces the chances of being sliced open on the counter attack. A 3-2-2-3. The defensive line is set to high, and the Offside Trap is set to frequent. All three CBs have full defensive duties; the DMFs are on medium defending, but with run arrows pointing back to my goal; and everyone else is on full attack-attack-ATTACK mode.

It’s a formation I can leave on for much longer periods than I ever dared to leave the 1-2-4-3 on for.

After the Everton romp, I went on a mini-run of defeats. Poor defeats: 0-2 to Bolton, who I beat easily at the start of the season. I lost 2-1 at West Ham, picking up two red cards as my frustration grew.

Then it was Chelsea. I was nervous before this one, spending an uncharacteristic amount of time in the formation and the Regulate Condition screens. I took to the field and scored early, then had to withstand almost constant pressure for the remainder of the half. The CPU had the ball and I was not going to get it back. I’m trying to wean myself off talking about scripting, but it’s mighty hard. Every loose ball went to Chelsea. There. That’s my ration used up for the whole week.

Chelsea got their equaliser early in the second half, as I knew they would. The game went on with both teams attacking dangerously but not really creating a clear-cut scoring chance. Both goalkeepers were as butterfingered with weak shots as ever in PES2008, but there was always a defender on hand to clear up the mess.

Donadel played in this game - a rare appearance after I’d noticed him sitting on the bench with a red form arrow and a full stamina bar. I played him as DMF, for old time’s sake.

I know the rhythms of a Master League by now - the patterns of players’ comings and goings - and Donadel is not long for this world. I’ll be shipping him out at the end of the season. It makes me feel sad after all he has done for me so far. His arrival in season 2009 was the match that lit the blue touchpaper that ignited the run that swept me to promotion from Division 2.

After giving him this build-up, you’ll more than likely know what came next. Donadel scored the winner against Chelsea - a diving header in the six-yard box, in the 90th minute. It was probably Donadel’s last appearance and last goal for me in PES2008.

*Moment of silence*

I’m back up to 3rd place in the table. There are six games left in the season. I will only catch Man Utd to take 2nd place if they lose most or all of their remaining games and I win all of mine. It’s not going to happen. Liverpool in 4th place are level with me on points, but have a poorer goal difference. I really want to hang on to that 3rd spot.