Okay, this is getting scary. I’ve been playing PES2009 solidly for three days now and I’m loving every moment of it. I might even play it for the next week, or at any rate until I feel the tug of FIFA09 again.

There are still huge shortcomings to this game that are all too apparent in this era of new-style FIFA. And yet, and yet… Maybe it’s time to stop resenting PES2009 for merely being ‘adequate’. Maybe it’s actually pretty good. It feels nice to be positive about PES again, probably for the first time in a year. However long or short a time this feeling lasts for, I’m glad it’s here. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost…

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I’ve gone on with my Master League career as Coventry City (using the Default players) and started my second season. I’ve moved down a difficulty level, from Top Player to Professional, just for this season (not that it’s helped me). The damn dog is back in the Master League menus. It appears to be a Scotch Terrier this year. What was it last year? I can’t remember.

My transfer activity in this career has been quite intensive. In PESes past I don’t remember being able to pick up quite so many new players as I’ve already picked up in this career. Even though I’ve been rubbish on the pitch and didn’t amass many points to spend, I still managed to pick up a  fair few players from the Youth and Unbelonging lists.

VAN DER VELDEN (pictured left)—An average player really, but still better than any Default player. Most notable for his strangely long head (left). The picture has not been doctored in any way. And people talk about FIFA’s zombies…

SCHONE—Just average again, but again he’s better than any Default player, so he was well worth getting. These are the kinds of players that have to be acquired in order to start picking up results.

MAI LUNGI—a nice find in the Unbelonging list. A veteran 28-year-old striker, tall and strong, with a good rasping shot on him. I’ve already scored a spectacular goal with him late on in a match that had me punching the air and grinning like an idiot.

DIETRICH—an early gem of a find in the Youth list. Can play DMF or AMF and already has decent stats for an 18-year-old. His development graph (right) is only above-average-looking, really, but I hope to ‘over-develop’ him in the same way I did Bradley last year. He’ll do until I can get Bradley or someone like him, put it that way.

KOBAYASHI—a bog-standard left-sided defender, can play SB or CB.  A placeholder. Better than the Defaults, but destined to be traded for a better player as soon as possible.

TRAORE—I got him from the Youth list mainly because of his name, but he’s not either of the more famous Traores from what I can tell. Still early days though.

ANTONINI—a decent right-back who can also play SMF. I off-loaded Giersen as soon as I got him.

JACKSON—a solid CB, one of the few highlights of last year’s ML. Another Youth player.

That’s a lot of new players for a struggling team at the start of season 2. I know… The underlying logistics of Master League have evidently been tweaked, enabling you to get this many players even with almost no funds.

I had to release a good few of the Defaults to make room for these players in my squad, and also get the wage budget down. I didn’t keep precise notes—mainly because I was enjoying myself too much playing PES2009, and I didn’t want to stop and break the ’spell’. I’ve still got most of the Default lot but the likes of Stein, Huylens, and Ceciu have all been released. I scraped through the last week of negotations with just 230 points to spare.

Here’s my current First XI:

I have to continue a tradition from last year by stating that my First XI is very, very provisional. None of my players are capable of playing two matches in a row.

So—I’m playing PES2009. I’m posting my squad lists and my First XI. What gives?

I like the gameplay. It’s not as good as FIFA09’s gameplay, but it’s still good. PES2009 also encourages patient, engrossing gameplay to a surprising degree.

Here’s a key goal I scored in a recent game. It’s been a bad start to the season. I’ve yet to win a league game after 5 games. But in the Cup I beat West Brom 1-0, a hard-fought and satisying victory. The clip doesn’t do full justice to the rhythms of play and the patience shown. This goal was the culmination of an exquisite passage of play (I’m praising PES2009 here, not myself) that saw me keep possession, lose it, get it back, keep it again, and then patiently wait for an opening to show itself. Here’s the last 15% or so of the sequence in question:

That stalwart of Master League DODO applies the finish—a lovely 25-yard curler into the top corner. What I loved about his goal was that it was my first proper goal scored from the ‘DMF hole’, as I call it—i.e. the slightly withdrawn, long-shot-friendly position that the DMF slots into in my beloved 4-3-3 formation.

PES’s assisted shooting mechanic has a surprising amount of subtlety, but it can still feel unsophisticated after experiencing the depth of FIFA’s semi-manual shooting. The weak, flapping goalkeepers are a persistent worry for the long-term. And I’ve never seen passing as unreliable in PES as it is in PES2009. Sometimes a pass just doesn’t go where you direct it to, for no real reason that I can see—something I’ll no doubt be moaning talking about in detail next week.

But I’m holding off on the detailed criticisms for now. These last few days have been overwhelmingly positive. I’m actually waking up in the morning and looking forward to playing PES again.

My mid-season 2021 signings were: Frank Lampard, John Terry, and Ronaldo. I’ll deal with them in reverse order.

My new Ronaldo is, of course, the currently-chunky Brazilian one. (I’d like to get the other one, the little Portuguese one, at some point, but he’s yet to retire and Regenerate.) My new Ronaldo is as slender as a gazelle and, you know what, he’s pretty damn good. People tend to forget that the real-life Ronaldo, at his peak, was arguably the most talented footballer since Maradona. The last time I had Ronaldo in PES was in PES5, when he was one of my top strikers, as he darn well should have been. I’m expecting him to be pretty special in this one too, although it’ll probably be a few season before I see the best of him. He’s still very young, only 21 years old.

John Terry is a player whom I don’t much like in real life. Before any Chelsea fans get on their high horses, hear me out. I acknowledge his considerable talents as a defender. It’s as an all-round footballer in the game that I have issues with him. John Terry is one of the most obnoxious characters in football right now. Who is it who chases after referees and shrieks at them the most? Yep, JT and his posse.

And another thing. John Terry was one of the so-called ‘golden generation’ of English footballers who disastrously flopped at the 2006 World Cup. Despite what England’s tabloid newspapers might have you believe, nobody in England really believed that England would go to Germany and come home with the World Cup. No.

All that I and everybody I know hoped for was that the team would perform well, play some exciting football, give us something to cheer, and perhaps get to the semi-final at best. Certainly England had the players to compete and give a good account of themselves. What we got instead was, in my opinion, the dullest, most dour performances from England at a major tournament that I can ever remember. John Terry was by no means the sole culprit—am I the only one who can tell that Steven Gerrard just doesn’t like playing for England?

But, yeah… Whatever. Rant over. John Terry is a dubious real-life character, but a fine PES player whenever I’ve had the opportunity to play with him. Maldini is in his early 30s now and before too long I’ll need another commanding CB to fill his boots.

And so to Frank Lampard. Yet another much-vaunted player who comprehensively failed to perform in Germany in 2006. And it could be argued that he was always only a flash in the pan a few seasons ago. Was it in 2004 that Lampard was being touted as the best midfielder in the world? It seems like a very long time ago now, whenever it was.

But, like Terry, Frank Lampard is a great PES player. He plays in several positions in midfield, is a great tackler, has got great energy, and of course that most important skill for a PES midfielder—Middle Shooting. I look forward to scoring several long-range sizzlers every season with Lampard.

I couldn’t bring in 3 new players without getting rid of some. I offloaded three existing members of my squad in the various deals that brought in the new boys. The players who went were Fernandez, Scholes and Khumalo.

Fernandez was a great player for my team during those often-tricky ‘middle years’ between the Default squad and my current near-dominance of the league. But alas, he’s now ageing and ripe for the chop. I had high hopes for Scholes but he’s just taking too long to develop—I might buy him back in a few seasons’ time when he’s at his peak. As for Khumalo, he was good but not great for me, and he formed part of the deal that prised Ronaldo away from his CPU club. I doubt I’d have got him otherwise.

My opponents in the quarter-final of the European Cup were Barcelona. In between the two legs of that tie, I played a crunch league game against Real Madrid. In most Master Leagues these three games taken together would have been among the hardest that I could ever (not) wish to have. But in this Master League, the fates have decreed that both Barca and Real are fairly average teams by the usual standards. They’re both still pretty good, but they’re nowhere near being the uber-opponents that they should be. It’s just the way things have gone.

At times I regret setting up this Master League in such haste back on March 1st. I do kind of wish I’d taken more time and at least included the English teams in a custom super-hard league. As much as I love my faux-Spanish league setup, I do miss playing against the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United. It would have been nice to at least have the possibility of meeting them in European competition. Back in March, I was pretty tired of the English teams after incessantly playing them (and effortlessly dribbling around them) on the version-that-must-not-be-named of PES2008. When I cracked open my PSP copy and set up an all-new Master League, I fancied a change.

Before the first leg of the European game against Barcelona, I implemented a change to my First XI that’s been in the wind for some time. Since I dropped the promising Kim Cyun Hi from my starting line-up a season or two ago, he’s been superb when filling in for Giggs up front on the left. This is despite Kim’s natural footedness being very much on the right.

It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that players can be as good (or even better) on their ‘wrong’ side in PES. Back in PES5, I played Bergkamp on his ‘wrong’ side, with staggering results. Kim Cyun Hi may be the same kind of player who’ll truly flourish for me on the ‘wrong’ side of the pitch. He was only ever competent for me in the middle and over on the right, not brilliant. I’m hoping he can be brilliant now he’s back in the regular first team.

All of which means that a place must be found for the mesmeric Giggs. In amongst all my good players, I only have about four or five gold-plated, undeniably brilliant players—Giggs is one of them. I decided to switch him back to the left-sided AMF role. He’s slightly more of a natural midfielder than he is a WF or CF. And he’s a better AMF than Burdner, who has been curiously anonymous for me so far. In PES6, Burdner was a star midfielder for me. Not so here. Not yet.

I’ve decided to stick with my 4-3-3, despite being strongly persuaded that an alternative formation might serve me better. The arguments for a 4-1-4-1, or a 4-2-4—or even my own demented brainchild, a 3-3-4—are variously compelling. But what can I say? I play PES every day, with hypnotic fervour, for a reason—it gives me more or less the same experience, day in, day out. I’m like a child who has to be told the same story in the same way, word for word, every day. Any departure is a cause for distress.

4-3-3 is an intrinsic part of my PES experience. I don’t know if I could stomach switching my main starting formation from my beloved, and familiar, 4-3-3. But never say never. The most I could do is to design an alternate formation and map it to a strategy button, and use it on the fly at selected moments in-game. I might do that in the off-season, when things are a mite less hectic.

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I won both legs of the Euro Cup tie against Barcelona 2-0 and it was pretty easy. I was barely challenged at all, which is actually quite rare for the latter stages of the Cups, I’ve found—even against an ‘average’ Barcelona. Or have I finally ‘aced’ PES2008, and will this be the norm for me from now on? I hope not. I still get enough awkward moments every season for me to know that the game still has a few nasty tricks up its virtual sleeve. Admittedly these tricks now can only come in the form of God Mode, a.k.a. good old scripting.

So that was me through to the semi-final of the European Cup. In the league game that formed the meat in the sandwich, I absolutely thumped Real Madrid 4-0.

Real Madrid are a mid-table team this year, and it shows. Their one bright spark is the almost peerless Kaiser, who usually torments me all game, but on this occasion he wasn’t playing.

So now I’m 13 points clear with 7 league games to go. Feasibly, I could have the title wrapped up with 4 games to go. I’d like that.