I think I’ve identified the problem. Yesterday I said I was going back to my PS3 Manager Mode career with Coventry City. The one I started on the Xbox360 with Atletico Madrid was proving too tough for me and I didn’t know why. Yes, there are better teams in the top Spanish league than there are in the English Coca Cola Championship. But it shouldn’t be so tough—on the same difficulty and control settings—that I was in danger of getting fired by Atletico. Should it?

Of course, the answer turned out to be simple. I was trying too hard to score a ’showbiz’ goal, as Mark Hughes used to call them (and often score them) back in his playing days. I needed to calm down and just try to get bread and butter goals, and pick up points and move up the table, and let the showbiz goals take care of themselves. Let them come naturally in the fullness of time.

Which is what I did. Results came immediately. My first game ended 2-0 to me. I drew the next game 2-2, but should have won it (see below). And I won the third game of the session 1-0. Here’s one of those bread and butter goals, which came about after I switched to a wide formation in the tactics editor. I wasn’t getting this kind of space until I did:

Total bread and butter, that goal. After my troubles of yesterday I felt as happy with it as I would have done with a 40-yard screamer. Well, almost as happy.

I did score a slightly prettier goal during this session. I uploaded it, but I made the mistake of submitting it to EA Sportsworld in slow-motion, and somehow it snipped off the part where the actual goal was scored. So there’s no point showing it here. For the record, it was a delicious outside-of-the-boot finish from Maxi Rodriguez, scored from a long, pretty aimless cross that’d bobbled to him across the penalty box. It went in off the far post.

I have stopped using YouTube to stream goals to this blog, possibly for good. The new site—LiveLeak—allows you to directly upload .flv video files (YouTube doesn’t), and there is little or no loss of quality. I’d never heard of this LiveLeak place until I saw them mentioned on Evo-Web the other day. I hope they’re not one of these fly-by-night setups and I can use them for a good long while.

So. I’d been trying to score stunners, long-range screamers that I could show off here, rather than just concentrating on winning the match, which is what real football is all about. And can there be any doubt that FIFA09, for better or worse, is all about real football? I don’t think there’s an argument left to be had.

There’s got to be a downside. In the middle of my three games I came up against… Osasuna.

Regular readers will recall that Osasuna were my bogey team in the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. (A very good PES game and one I will return to at some point this year). Back then it seemed that every season they were primed to frustrate me no matter what I did or how well I played. Surely the hoodoo couldn’t translate into a whole new ball game?

It bloody well could translate. I went into a 2-0 lead against them and I thought: that’s it, I’ve cracked it at last… Naturally, this heralded an Osasuna fightback. I’ve noticed in FIFA09 that there is a kind of momentum (in Seabass’ dread phrase) that the CPU can build up when it’s behind. The possession bonus that it enjoyed in FIFA08 is still in 09, only it’s a bit more subtle I think. You don’t see the CPU players twisty-turning on the wings to the same infuriating degree, but they still have the old possession ‘magic’ when they need it.

Of course, it’s up to the human player to defend better. With discipline and patience. I didn’t.

Osasuna came back to draw 2-2. Of course they did. I threw everything at them in the last minutes, aching for the winner. I was horribly frustrated. Bloody Osasuna! They’d only gone and done me again. I’ll be watching out for the return fixture later in the season.

Osasuna. They’ve only gone and done it again. I’m officially declaring them my bogey team. Forget Valencia, Barca, Real, Deportivo—when Osasuna are in town, I tremble. They’ve pulled off yet another one of their patented 1-0 victories over me. I was cursing the place down at ten o’clock in the morning. Is it ever too early to swear?

I think it’s the third season in a row that they’ve managed to do it, and each time the game has always played out the same way. They got their early goal and somehow resisted all two million of my subsequent attempts on their goal. Their goal came from a cross that ricocheted off my defender—Maldini, one of the top defenders in the entire game, whose astronomic stats were unable to stop him becoming a statue and letting the ball simply bounce off his knees, ignoring my repeated and determined hammering of the Square button to clear it. The ricochet travelled across the six yard box direct to the feet of Osasuna’s lone striker, who strangely blasted it back across the area instead of into the net. Happily for him, though, my other top-rated centre-back, Fernandez, was keen to deflect it into my net off his knees for an amusing own-goal. So that was fine.

The rest of the game, despite me having the regulation bazillion chances, was curious. Osasuna had some good possession and created further chances of their own. They had 12 chances overall, which is about 11 more than they usually make against me. I knew the game was going to end 1-0 to them almost from the start. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps. But no, probably not.

Newly-promoted AIK gave me a tough game. Who the hell are they, anyway? I literally cannot remember ever playing them before, although I know that I must have, even if the last time was down in Division 2 all those seasons ago.

After the Osasuna farce I really wanted a win to stay in close touch with the top of the table. So I really focused hard and set out to keep another very determined CPU team at bay. If I could shut them out at the back, that’d be half the job done. It worked and I was 2-0 up heading into the last ten minutes. Then, of course, they had to get their regulation, automatic CPU goal. It had to be 2-1 for the last few minutes. There’s just no way of avoiding it sometimes. (Too many times.)

I held on for the win. Then came the season’s first league fixture against Barcelona. I hammered them 6-3. Pulverised them. Andy Cole got a hat-trick in this game. Kim Cyun Hi got two goals. I forget who got the sixth. I was 6-0 up by 65 minutes. Again, the CPU started scoring automatic goals, but not even a script could threaten to overturn this result.

At the moment, the best all-round striker currently on my books is Andy Cole. He’s neck-and-neck with Kim Cyun Hi for top scorer. In the long term I suspect Kim Cyun Hi will easily eclipse him, but for now Cole is the main man. Giggs isn’t too far behind either. In fact, come to think of it, all of my players are great. I haven’t got one turkey. Even Larsson, who I’ve had for about nine seasons now but have left underused and thus underdeveloped, has started to come through. Perhaps only Donk is a weak link, but he never lets me down on the rare occasions when he stands in for one of the other CBs.

It’s Valenciennes. My latest bogey team is Valenciennes.

I can’t beat them. Even if I’m 1-0 up and it looks as if I will beat them, they’ll score two or three goals with seeming effortlessness, and beat me. Being in a small league I seem to be playing them every few minutes.

They’re also my current Cup opponents. I’m pretty sore about the first leg. I was 1-0 up, at home, until almost the end of the game. Then somehow ended up losing it 1-2. How the—? I don’t know how I let that happen, but it’ll make the second leg—which I’ll play sometime later today—very interesting. I’ll need to score at least two goals, against my bogey team, in a game that I’m still learning.

Last-gen PES2008 plays a sublime game of football. I have to mention the speed of the game. When I tried to get back into PES5 a few months ago, one of the factors that ultimately turned me off it was what that it seemed just too fast for me. I’m happy to report that I don’t find this to be the case at all with the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008. I think a lot of this satisfaction has to do with me not playing the ultra-slow-paced FIFA08 so much nowadays. (It’s been two or three weeks since I last played FIFA08.)

Slowly I’m picking up what can and cannot be done in PES2008. (Pretty soon I’m going to drop the last-gen/next-gen thing and just call it PES2008.) At the moment, defending cannot be done. The CPU attacks me with pace and deadly passing and I’m all over the place at the back.

For me, this PES2008 is effectively an all-new PES game—and I’m delighted with it. It might be March, but in PES terms it feels like October. My PES year has been saved.

But I should have done with it what I usually do with a new PES game every October: just play Exhibitions and Tournaments for several days until I feel I’ve got the measure of things.

When the PSP version landed on my doormat a couple of weeks ago I skipped the preamble and jumped straight into a Master League. On Top Player. It was a mistake to do that, but having done it I don’t want to undo it. I’m having a great time in PES again.

In the league I’ve played a couple more games: won 1, lost 1. The one I lost? Yes, it was against Valenciennes…

At least that solitary victory—a 1-0 win with an explosive centre-forward’s header from Podolski from the edge of the box—has lifted me off the foot of Division 2.