PES Chronicles

How careless of me. Here I have been playing PES2008* for a couple of weeks now, and I still haven’t done a proper job of updating my First XI and Full Squad lists. Here’s the First XI:

Despite my lowly position and my continuing failure to get to grips with the game, I think this is a pretty good First XI.

There are a couple of niggling worries. Yamada is playing so out of position at the moment, but I want to play Camacho on the right. And Yamada is a little short of having the quality needed to take the place of one of my strikers up front. Couto and Maldini in the centre of defence are both Youth players and not very strong. I concede loads of goals and it’s all their fault (not mine…). But I want to develop them and I haven’t got any great CBs on the bench anyway.

(Whoops. I’ve just noticed that I’ve missed a player off the squad list: a very capable CB/DMF called Donk (really). I got him in the first negotiations in season 2007, and he’s been pretty solid. He’s only on the bench now because I’ve got Maldini and Couto and I want to develop them.  I haven’t got time now to update the squad list, but I’ve got negotiations coming up in the next day or so. A couple of players will leave and others will be coming in, so I’ll update the list then.)

One peculiar thing I have noticed about PES2008: the CPU is very keen to initiate trade-in deals of its own.

I’ve never known the CPU in any PES to do that before, or if it did, it was a very rare occasion and the players it offered to you were absolutely terrible. Not so this time around. Of my current squad, I got Batlles, Sergio Garcia, Sibon, and Komol—all of them pretty good players—from trade-ins offered by the CPU for the likes of Castolo, Stein, and the rest of them.

*It’s no longer ‘last-gen PES2008′. It’s just PES2008. From now on I’ll only draw the distinction when specifically comparing it to the so-called next-gen PES2008 . 

Every match I play in my new Master League career as Coventry City on the PSP version of PES2008 shows me something new about the game.

During this league game against a very tidy Almeria side, I discovered a couple of things. For example: you can’t sprint in midfield, or at least it’s best not to sprint in midfield. No matter how much space you think you have in front of you, a CPU player will emerge from the side of the screen and nick the ball off the toe of your sprinting player. I don’t know if this is a side-effect of the PSP’s smaller screen. Will I see the same effect on the big screen when I upgrade to the PS2 verison next week?

Part of me hopes so. Even though it mostly nerfs one of my favourite long-standing PES moves: the extended sprint in a straight line through midfield (not all of it; just 10 virtual yards or so) followed by a stupendous, blockbusting, 45-yard piledriver into the top corner of the net. The name Mathieu is not far from my mind here…

It’s still early days for me and this Coventry City team in this Master League, so it could be that all I need are better players and the CPU won’t be able to steal the ball from me as easily as it does at the moment.

I took the lead against Almeria. From one of their corners I cleared the ball and it found its way to Camacho, a player who I can’t get enough of at the moment, standing just inside the centre circle.

Only Podolski and Sergio Garcia were ahead of him. I played a nice floated through-ball with the outside of Camacho’s boot over the defence into Garcia’s stride. He was clean through on goal, albeit at an angle.

After a week playing this ‘last-gen’ PES2008 I knew that I couldn’t afford to take my time with the finish—the CPU defenders were tracking back and would be upon me before I knew what was happening if I left it for even a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

I aimed with the analogue nub (I use the analogue nub!) at the opposite top corner and pecked at the shoot button. I’m still getting used to the last-gen version’s more sensitive shooting. The ball flew into the net, exactly where I wanted it to. It was Garcia’s first goal in my team. I was pretty pleased with it.

Results have been hard to come by. It would have been nice to grind out the win, but I couldn’t hold on. Around the 80th minute an Almeria striker jinked through my central defenders (Maldini and Couto, both 17-year-old Regens) and tucked the ball past my keeper. 1-1 it finished.

The first game after the mid-season negotiations always makes for a refreshing change.

You’ve staggered toward the mid-season, and in some cases fallen over the line. Half your team played the last few games with three-quarters-full stamina bars, and the other half sat on the bench recovering from their one-quarter-full stamina bars.

Once the four-week negotiations are up, every player is once again at your disposal, fully fit and raring to go with their gleaming 100% stamina bars. Any new players are also there, just itching to be put through their paces. Yes, the first game after a negotiation period is always a bit special.

Sunderland were the opponents. Sunderland were my bogey team in my last ML career. That’s one reason but not the only reason they’re in this ML career. I wanted to sprinkle Division 2 of this Superleague with a few token weaker teams.

My entire First XI was fit and in form. I kicked off, and immediately worked the ball out to Leonardo (pictured left). Straightaway, I could tell that, no, he’s definitely not the famous Leonardo… (Not unless somebody at Konami has made a serious blunder, anyway.)

I took him on a little run up the wing to see if he is a wonder-dribbler or not. He’s not. He still seems pretty handy, though. I kept him on the field for the whole game and he was always a threat.

Sadly, I conceded a goal to Sunderland after about 5 minutes. I had virtually my whole team in Sunderland’s half, looking for an early goal myself, but conceded possession with a sloppy, over-ambitious pass. Sunderland broke. Maldini isn’t fast enough yet to cover the holes that their strikers exploited. They one-twoed their way around him, and I rushed the goalkeeper out but couldn’t stop the goal. 1-0 down. Damn.

I got my equaliser pretty quickly. It must have been only a few minutes later when I passed with Maldini to Matuzalem, who sent an aerial through-ball down the right wing towards Kmolo. As the ball bounced I tried for a flashy first-time half-volley from 25 yards (they look and feel just great when they go in). The Sunderland keeper saved – but, as ever in PES2008, he couldn’t hold onto the ball. Altintop followed up for a simple tap-in. Here’s the whole goal:

I was happy enough with it. The rest of the game panned out pretty much like your average football bore-draw. Both teams occasionally looked like scoring but there was always the last-man tackle, the saving challenge, the acrobatic goalkeeper to claw the shot away…

Sunderland aren’t my bogey team anymore. I haven’t identified my bogey team yet this time around – perhaps I haven’t got one. Perhaps it was only my paranoid PES imagination that made me think Sunderland were ever my bogey team.

Yes…. I have to put the name of my current ML team into the post title, as I’ve already been through a mid-season negotiations 2008 with my Coventry City team. Whatever else happens, Singers FC will definitely be my sole ML team for the rest of the PES year. It’d get too confusing otherwise.

I had to be careful on several fronts during this short mid-season negotiation period. I had to keep within my House Rules and I had to make sure I left myself with enough PES points to pay the salary bill at the end of the season.

I found a Brazilian attacking midfielder/striker called Leonardo and traded Espimas+1500 points for him.

Ah, but is this the same Leonardo who famously elbowed an American player in the 1994 World Cup? I don’t think so. At the age of 25 here in PES2008 game-year 2008, there’s no way he could be, surely? He’d have to be a Regen if he was that Leonardo, and thus he’d still be a teenager in the game.

In any case my Leonardo doesn’t look anything like the Leonardo on the right. But this isn’t always a reliable indicator. Seabass (curse him) and his so-called ‘team’ (curse them too) might well have used a generic Brazilian player image. It’s confusing. A quick Google uncovers several non-Classic Leonardos that my new player could well be based upon. One of those, I think (and hope), is my Leonardo. By the by, be very careful about Googling anything with the world ‘Brazilian’ in it. I’m only saying.

Classic Players are banned from my team after Elcherino single-handedly destroyed almost every opponent – and almost destroyed PES2008 as a game – for me last season. If my new Leonardo is a Classic, I’ll have to bench him and then offload him at the end of the season at a huge loss, and bring in an average, ‘proper’ player in his place.

I didn’t get any other players from the regular transfer market. Wanting to conserve my PES points, I concentrated instead on the Youth list.

I saw Maldini there. Maldini is not a Classic Player, and he’s one of the three players from my last ML career who I’m allowed to have again. So I made an offer, not really thinking I had a chance of getting him.

I was delighted – really, really delighted (almost frighteningly so) – to get him. Yes, Maldini’s 17 right now, and an even worse player than Libermann, but give him a couple of seasons and I hope he’ll be the player I remember from the last few PESes.

Still in the Rookies list, I looked for a goalkeeper. I found David James, a famously dodgy keeper in real life but solid enough in this computer game. I picked him up.

I also found a stalwart from my old PES5 and PES6 ML teams: Pjinatnigh. He’s a left-sided SB who also plays at DMF. One curious thing: in those last couple of PESes, I’m sure he had a very useful Middle Shooting ability. But it seems to have been taken off him in PES2008. Perhaps I’m misremembering. I don’t think so, though. But never mind. I snapped him up anyway.

So, I brought in four players and transferred one out. This left me with a surplus of three players. I had 28 players in the squad. I’m only allowed to have 25.

I put several players on the transfer list – among them the likes of Gatti, Bale, and Macco, all good players – but, as ever, no one made offers for them. This is really something that has to be spruced up for PES2009 and later. We’ve put up with a half-witted version of a football transfer market in PES for far too long.

Time to release some players. I decided to release Ivarov, Ettori, and Giersen. No regrets about any of them.

In the last week of the four-week period, I received loan offers for Macco and Gutierrez. I hesitated for a moment, as it would leave me effectively with a squad of 23. Then I accepted both offers. The PES points earned will come in handy, and I think I have a strong enough squad to field a respectable team in every game from a pool of 23 players.

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In my new First XI I picked Maldini in place of Libermann. I want to start developing Maldini straightaway. Being a 17-year-old, he’ll probably only start one in three games anyway.

One of my House Rules is that at least one original Default player must start in every game. I dropped Bale and put Ruskin in.

Leonardo replaces Morfeo up front on the left.

James is not yet anywhere near as good as Akinfeev, so my keeper keeps his place.

Pjinatnigh also has to sit out for now, waiting for his chance.

Up front, Altintop is living on borrowed time. I’m going to give him another five games in the starting line-up, then consider replacing him with the currently much more effective Caracciolo. I know that Altintop will become a top player in the future, but at the moment he’s a lumbering liability most of the time. In many ways he reminds me of Schwarz at a similar stage of my last ML career.

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NB: For reasons out of my control, I can no longer respond to comments as quickly as I’d like to. At work I used to have unlimited internet access, and spent quiet parts of the evening tinkering with future posts and replying to any comments. This has all ended. Internet access at my workplace has been completely blocked. Thus it might be very late at night, or even the next morning, before I get to reply to comments now.