Back in December 2007, while praising FIFA08 I described it as the Ninja Gaiden of football games. For those unacquainted with Ninja Gaiden, I don’t mean the original, classic NES game(s). I mean the forbiddingly difficult action adventure game on the original Xbox. (NG enjoys cult status because of its eye-wateringly steep learning curve and unforgiving boss fights. The first random enemies on the first levels of that game are as hard as many final boss fights in other, lesser games.)

FIFA09 is also the Ninja Gaiden of football games—perhaps even more so. (It’d be more symmetrical to call it the Ninja Gaiden 2, but the sequel was not a worthy follow-up to the original, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s the Ninja Gaiden Sigma…)

I’ve been playing FIFA09 a lot for almost exactly one month now. A few weeks ago I thought I had it licked. Not literally—that would be both disgusting and pointless. I mean figuratively, in the sense of ‘I know how this game plays now, and my continued playing of it will be just be a variation of everything I have experienced thus far’.

How wrong I was. Of course, if you play FIFA09 as it comes out of the box—or entirely online, as many people do—then no, after a while it won’t have much else to show you.

The tipping point came with the switch to semi-manual and manual controls. That on its own was enough to completely transform the game that comes out of the box. I’ve posted a lot about the satisfying nature of playing with different control settings. But perhaps the ultimate game-changer for FIFA09 comes when you start to play with bad players. Yes. I have begun a new career with Coventry City.

I’m playing on World Class difficulty—but maybe not for much longer. I have so far played 5, lost 4, drew 1. I’ve only scored two goals. I’m playing so badly. It’s not even the end of August yet and I’ve had a warning from the board.

And I’m playing with what for me is a pretty conservative formation. I usually like a nice 4-3-3. Eight years of PES left me all but unable to play with anything else. Here I’m using a modified 4-4-2. I’ve pushed the wide midfielders forward, and dropped one of the central midfielders slightly deeper. Playing with Atletico Madrid in my other, much more successful MM career, it works brilliantly well. Alas, with Coventry City it’s proving a pretty poor formation. I might try a 4-5-1 or something. If that doesn’t bring me any joy I’ll switch to a 4-3-3, or even a 3-4-3. Might as well go out all guns blazing.

I can see myself being sacked soon and having to restart. And I can see this happening not just once or twice, but many, many times. The game is just bloody tough. I cannot emphasise enough how hard it is to play FIFA09 with an average set of players on World Class difficulty using semi-manual and manual controls!

I’m struggling to muster any real joy out of playing any of the games. This is the most worrying thing for me. I think I’m still playing as if my players are world-beaters. I have to slow down and not be so anxious to do spectacular things with the ball. The through-ball bug is really, well, bugging me right now. I’ll have some more to say about that tomorrow. I’ll also post my full First XI and their Overall ratings.

Barcelona—it was the first time that we met. Barcelona—how can I forget? The moment that you stepped into the room you—

That’s quite enough of that. Within a few weeks, Barcelona have been my opponents five times: once in the league, twice in the Division 1 Cup, and twice in the European Championships.

I’m finding that Barcelona are a strange package in this Master League career. I rarely have trouble beating them and they never seem to do anything special in the league. At the end of each season they’re usually hanging around in the top 6, but nowhere near challenging for the title. And I think it might all be my fault.

When I set up this league I omitted the English clubs. This sent all the English clubs’ players onto the open market, from where the existing clubs—spread across all four leagues—snapped them up. The end result is that in many cases the English club players seem to have diluted the strength of some clubs, Barcelona being one of them. Jamie Carragher is currently at Barcelona in my Master League. Now, I think Jamie Carragher in real life is a fine player, but in PES he could only really be considered an above-average player. Although Real Madrid, for one, seem to have been peculiarly boosted by their acquisition of the likes of Mark Noble (yes, Mark Noble).

I don’t know. Maybe Barcelona being mediocre isn’t all my fault. They sure are easy to beat, though. Most of the time. I beat them in the League. I absolutely thumped them in the Division 1 Cup. Leathered them. Hammered them into oblivion—as per the screenshot. (That’s a 9-3 scoreline to me, if it’s a bit too blurry.)

In the first of our two European group games, things weren’t much different—it was an easy 3-0 to me. In the second tie, though… I had a nightmare, and went down 0-1 early on. Then I started hacking away at the opposition as I like to do sometimes. Cutting to the chase, I was down to eight men by the second half. I was 0-1 behind and three players down against Barcelona. Even an average Barcelona should romp home to victory now. Things were not looking good.

But, while it was still only 0-1 to Barca, there was always a chance… I came to my senses. I rejigged my formation into an emergency 3-3-1, as seen in the diagram. I went with three CBs and pulled my DMF all the way back—as far back as he would go on the formation screen—to sit just in front of them. I pulled my two AMFs all the way back as well, to sit just behind the halfway line. I had a lone CF—Kim Cyun Hi—who was also sitting as deep as possible.

I brought on Komol to play as the left-sided AMF, despite it not being one of his positions. I’ve played with Komol for almost ten seasons now and I know I can rely on him to get me out of a tight spot. Immediately I took him off on a swashbuckling run across the pitch that led to a shot that hit the post… And Kim Cyun Hi was on hand to knock in the rebound.

1-1, and I was prepared to settle for that. I set my ATT/DEF level to full defence and prepared to see out the remaining ten minutes. I anticipated it being difficult. My plan was to defend doggedly and try to hold up the ball in midfield whenever I got possession. I would just run down the clock if I could.

However. Camacho—dear old Camacho (he’s 27 now!)—had the ball in the wide AMF position. The entire Barcelona team seemed to be swarming around my few attackers. The replay shows how many they were and how few I was. I felt in my water that Barca would win the ball back from me in a moment if I tried to keep passing it around. In PES, you end up just knowing when the CPU has decided to get the ball back. So I took a shot with Camacho, a speculative shot:

Yessssss……. 2-1 to me it ended. I’d scored twice in the second half whilst 0-1 down and having had three players sent off. Despite the sheer unrealism of it all, I was delirious. This is the kind of thing that I play PES for. I’d hate it if it happened too often, of course. But once in a while? It’s the feeling I get from occasions like those that keeps me playing PES.

Oh dear. I’ve finished season 2014 and it all went pretty badly wrong in the closing stages. This was supposed to be the season where I either won the Treble, or at least ended up with something to show for my efforts.

But I got knocked out of the Champions League at the pre-qualifying group stage and crashed out of the D1 Cup. I was doing okay in the League, snapping at Valencia’s heels. I was confident I could win the title at least this season. And I was doing great in the WEFA Masters Cup—the Euro consolation prize—where I met Marseille in the semi-final. I was regularly playing and beating Barca and Real Madrid in the league. So Marseille in Europe should be no trouble, right? Right?

First of all I was intrigued to see the formation that the CPU was using: a weird variant on the 4-3-3, a kind of 4-2-1-3 that I don’t recall seeing the CPU use before. Those two CMFs look to be too close together. The sole AMF will have his work cut out. The burden on the three forwards (two SS and a CF) is proportionally greater than in my (relatively) more sedate 4-3-3 formation.

I thought I was going to exploit Marseille’s strange formation to the full after a first leg at their ground that finished 1-2 to me. A win, and two away goals: I couldn’t help but regard the tie as effectively over. The second leg would have to be an utter disaster for me to go out now. The final here I come…

But no. Marseille turned me over 1-3 at my place, winning the semi-final 3-4 on aggregate. It was pretty pathetic. I have no idea what went wrong, really. I just seemed to be overwhelmed by frantic, fast, lethal, attacking CPU play, and none of my many raids forward came to anything.

Disappointed (this is now my eighth season without any kind of Cup win), I turned my attention back to the league. With four games to go I was a point behind Valencia, who I played next.

It was a tough, tough game. Both sides had chances. The very best chances fell to me, but it was one of those games where the woodwork and a super-goalie conspired to shut me out. 0-0 it finished, then, without any change at the top of the table. I had to win all my remaining games and hope Valencia slipped up. I was sure Valencia would at least draw one of their remaining games. My goal difference was superior. All I had to do was win all three games, and I could still do it.

I won my next game, then played Real Madrid. As I’ve mentioned once or twice, I’ve had a pretty good time against them in this division. Imagine my extreme chagrin, then, to go 0-1 down straight from their kickoff. I equalised. Real scored again. I equalised again. Real scored again. That’s how it went, all the way to the final whistle, with the final score 4-4.

Did I not like that. Not only was it an utterly stupid old-FIFA-style scoreline of the kind that I always hate to see in PES (thankfully not so much in the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008), but it let Valencia grab a three-point lead going into the final fixture. I now had to win and hope Valencia lost.

I didn’t win my last game. I lost it, pretty dismally—Osasuna beat me 2-1. I was trying too hard. But in the end it wouldn’t have mattered, as Valencia won their last game and took the Division 1 Championship by a whopping 6 points—the biggest gap there’s been between 1st and 2nd all season. I was, and am, displeased with myself.

So I end season 2014 completely empty-handed. It’s getting annoying. The only thing I’ve won in PES2008 so far (on PSP/PS2) is the Division 2 title, way back when. Nothing else. At least it means I still have everything left to play for. The hunger is still there, spurring me on. Roll on season 2015. Finishing second this season means I’ll go straight into the full WEFA Championship tournament—none of that pesky pre-qualifying nonsense. I’ll have a normal start to the season with just one game per week. As ever the Treble is the target and this time I think I’m really going to do it.