I have failed to win promotion from Division 2 in my fourth Master League season on PES2009. FAILED. A big theme of the past week or two has been how strange, in lots of ways, I’m finding this year’s Master League. It’s simply not following the usual script. As everybody knows who has ever played the mode to any extent, there usually comes a ‘tipping point’, and it usually comes after just a season or two—maybe three at the most. Not after four seasons. Or five…

After the tipping point comes, you’re supposed to streak to promotion. Then after maybe a season of holding steady in the top division, you streak to the title, and thence to the Cup, and the European Cup, and the fabled Treble… And after six seasons or ten seasons or whatever your own personal ‘magic number’ is, you have a stellar squad that can almost win games on their own. (Occasional puzzling defeats still come along, but that’s just PES being dodgy with you.)

When things get to that point, you can be considered to have ‘completed’ your Master League career. The only real reason to play on now is out of curiosity, or because you enjoy the challenge of repeating your feats season in, season out. Most people restart, play another career, see if they can do it all differently, with or without the addition of House Rules.

Me, I like to go on, indefinitely. Some PESes are different. PES5 I found consistently tough, only winning three Trebles in about 40 consecutive seasons in the one career. That unforgettable year on PES5 will always be my yardstick to judge ML by, for better or worse. It’s still early days for PES2009 (yes I’m still saying that), but if these first four seasons are anything to go by, the longevity of ML this year could be close to PES5 proportions.

And here’s one reason why—this season’s final league table, where after such a good start I finished fourth from bottom:

So I’ll be spending season 5 still in the bottom division. Season FIVE. This is getting scary (but I like it…).

And I was doing so well. My last two posts showed great progress compared to last season’s pitiful effort. Yesterday I was sitting pretty in 5th place after 14 games, just three points from a promotion spot. What the hell happened?

I just collapsed in the final third of the season. I lost plenty, drew a few, and only won a handful more games. My slide down the table was relentless. I’m struggling to pinpoint an exact reason. I was never scoring loads of goals this season, but at least I was shutting out the CPU up the other end. I stopped doing that—and started conceding silly goals.

It’d be easy to blame the influx of three new young players. It’d be easy to say they diluted my Teamwork stat. The truth is that before they arrived, back when I only had 17 players to choose from, I concentrated better, took fewer risks, played more methodically, more slowly. As soon as I had the comparative luxury of a squad of 20 to choose from, I lost my focus. I started thinking I had an automatic right to possession, and that every attack should result in a goal-scoring chance. Wrong on both counts, especially in PES2009.

So much for season 2011-2012. I really, really thought this was the season for promotion. It hurts, actually. All I can do is lick my wounds and move onto the next season.

There was one very bright moment in the last stages of the season. A goal that literally made me shout out loud. It was one of those special PES moments, really. It was all the sweeter for being scored with my new young player, Kim Cyun Hi, who’s showing some precocious talent even this early.

Kim was playing wide on the right in this game. The ball breaks for him, and I decided to take a first-time shot, from an angle, out near the corner of the penalty box. The ball flew absolutely ruler-straight into the far top corner, across the keeper. It was the first goal of its kind I’ve scored on PES2009 (the Gambino one from the other day was more central, and the ball moved a bit in the air, dipping at the end; this Kim Cyun Hi goal just flew).

Okay, it does superficially look like ‘just another long-range PES goal’. The poor quality of the mobile phone clip doesn’t do it any favours either. But this is PES2009, a game with arguably the hardest long-range shooting mechanic of any PES game. Goals like this are pretty hard to come by. Even if PES2009 does ‘do a PES2008′ and become too easy in the long run, and I start scoring goals like this for fun, I’ll still remember this particular goal, and my exultant yell at the moment of scoring it, for a very long time to come.

Could this be the season? As I suspected would happen, losing most of my Master League squad to the end-of-season attrition of salary payments has actually improved my game. I’m concentrating better and playing better.

Now when I get a 1-0 lead I treat it like a fragile egg that I mustn’t drop. This is my traditionally roundabout way of saying that I’ve started picking up wins. With a squad of 17 players! Who are nearly always knackered! It’s a funny old world.

Here (left) is my full, complete, actual current squad again. I still can’t believe I’m actually trying to play PES2009’s rather tough Master League with this paltry roster of players. I did okay on the PS2/PSP version of PES2008 for half a season with a squad of 16—but that was then and this is now. PES2009 is, rather gratifyingly, a wholly different game.

Of course, I won’t have to survive the whole of this season with 17 players. I just have to make it to mid-season, and then I can pick up some fresh players. And then at the end of the season, if need be, have another mass clear-out. This could become a vicious circle.

What I need to do to break out of the circle is simple: start winning. Winning brings points not just in the league table, but in the bank. And what do points make?

I’ve finally scored a long-range goal in PES2009 worthy of posting on the blog. It’s not the most outrageously spectacular long-range goal ever seen in a PES game. But it’s my first true long-ranger PES2009. It feels really tough to score them this year. Making space for the shot is hard enough. The build-up to this goal is one of the few times I’ve found enough space in midfield to have a reasonable chance of scoring. GAMBINO (my only MIddle Shooting-equipped midfielder) is the triggerman:

I enjoyed it. From this angle and speed it doesn’t look nearly as good as it looked ‘live’. But they never do, do they?

Here’s the surprising current table—I’m doing quite well:

Only scoring 5 goals in 8 games is pretty poor, really. But I’m not conceding many either, crucially. And—I don’t want to be hasty, but I think I may have solved the corner problem. This is where the CPU will almost automatically score itself a goal from a corner kick whenever it needs one. I’ve discovered how to drastically reduce the instances of this. I doubt you could ever completely stop it: some CPU goals are just meant to be. We know it. Seabass knows it. Seabass knows that we know it. And he doesn’t care.

All I do is watch the penalty area just before the kick is taken. A CPU runner will dart around in the box. I follow him with my controlled player and make sure I’m in front of him when the kick comes over. But that’s only half of the equation. I still have to time the jump and header right. It’s no good pressing jump too early and hoping the game will interpret my wishes for me, and jump my defender at the right time. Doing that—pressing too early and letting the game do the work for me—is a bad habit learned way back around PES3, I think. 

Using this method I’ve gone from conceding at about 80% of CPU corners to conceding at about 10% of them. It really does work. Admittedly a large part of this is simply having better players, of course, but the method was also working quite well when I still had the likes of Baumann playing at CB.

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.