Aside from all the sound and fury over FIFA09, and the relative mutedness of PES2009 right now (come on, Konami, pull your corporate finger out), it’s worth mentioning that I’m still playing the PS2/PSP version of PES2008 with great enjoyment. In truth, I mainly play it on my PSP nowadays—there are just too many other great games competing for time in my PS3. But I am still playing it.

I will go on playing my PES2008 Master League career at least until the FIFA09 demo appears in September. Even then I’ll probably still play my ML career, off and on, until PES2009 emerges from hiding in late October. Despite this being a proper annus horribilis for PES fans, I’m strangely just as immersed as ever in my Master League. What can I say. I’ve been used to playing Master League all year for several years now, and old habits die hard.

In season 2021, it’s pretty much business as usual. I’m coming up to the mid-season negotiations. I’m top of the league by 8 points (Valencia, as usual, are chasing me in second place). I’m top of my group in Europe. I’m in the quarter-finals of the Division 1 Cup. Things are looking rosy for another Treble.

Regular readers will know how much I love scoring long-range goals. Blasting one in from 30 yards out just feels so good. For me they’re the best possible kind of goals to score. PES has always done long-range shooting very well, particularly from PES5 onwards. The sheer visceral joy of smacking the ball into the back of the net is one of the greatest pleasures that PES gaming has to offer. (FIFA08’s relative lack of oomph in its long-range shooting is one of my minor quibbles with that game.)

I’ve already scored a contender for ‘most favourite PES long-ranger ever’. That one came from Prieto. No, you really can’t beat having a strong DMF with Middle Shooting in your team. In a recent league game I scored a goal with my regular DMF, Bradley, that was slightly different from the norm. Instead of flying straight and true, with power and swerve, it sort of looped up high and then dipped outrageously behind the stranded keeper and into the net. Here’s the default view:

The strike comes from deep inside the centre circle, a yard or two inside the opposition half. I haven’t got out the tape measure to make it official, but I think that makes it a longer-distance strike than the Prieto effort.

The Big Dipper, as I call this goal, truly lives up to its name when seen from pitch-level. The reverse angle shows the crazy path of the ball very clearly. Initially, it rises like a field-goal attempt in American Football.

I scored this goal while sitting at my desk at work. if you’ve got your speaker volume up, you can hear a ringing telephone in the background. I was ignoring it. I was concentrating on filming the goal replay with my mobile phone. Have people no consideration?

In the few months of PES2008 left to me I will, of course, be trying to better this latest long-ranger. I think it’ll be tough, though. To score from even closer to the halfway line I’d probably have to start pressing shoot whilst still in my half—which the game would interpret as a defensive clearance.

The last few days have been all Bradley, Bradley, Bradley. You’d think it’d be easier for me to just marry him or something. All of this fixation upon Bradley probably gives the impression that he is my Most Valuable Player. He may well be that in the future, but for now he is not. For now, Komol is my top player, the man whom I cannot do without.

Komol started coming good last season, when he scored my greatest PES2008 goal so far, and one of my top 5 PES goals ever.

I love to score long-range goals in PES. Best of all is when it’s a long-range goal that means something.

I hadn’t started at all well up here in Division 1. That’s par for the course, really, for me and Master League—I never get off to a flyer whenever I eventually go up to join the big boys. Every year I read about other PES Master League players getting promotion in season 1, winning the title in season 2, and securing the Treble in season 3—all whilst making love to a beautiful woman, presumably.

Can such stories be true? Or is there really a desperate cabal of 15-year-olds permanently deployed on the internet, persistently laying claim to unlikely gaming feats?

Perhaps there are players good enough at PES to ‘complete’ Master League within three seasons. I’d bet there are players good enough to do it with the Default squad. I’m emphatically not one of those players.

Against Deportivo la Coruna I was heading for yet another 0-0 scoreline. It would have left me with a record of W1 D4 L1 for the season. Not disgraceful. Not relegation form (yet). But hardly the kind of steady mid-table success that I had in mind, and which me and my squad are both now good enough to achieve, realistically.

0-0, then, but ahhhhh… In the 90th minute, Komol collected the ball out wide. And then it happened. One of the best, most satisfying long-rangers I’ve ever scored on PES2008, and yet again one of the finest goals I can remember scoring on any PES, ever.

With some goals, you just feel them. In the pit of your stomach, in the marrow of your bones. I could turn the pretension up to 11 here, but I’ll let the replay speak for itself:

Having three replay angles is a first for me on this blog. I really, really like the goal. Others may disagree, but my mind is made up. I love this goal and I want to marry it. I think I love the fact that it’s a crowded penalty box, and the flight of ball initially takes it up toward outer space before gravity (albeit the virtual, computer game kind) starts to do its job.

There was no time for Deportivo to come back. I picked up a crucial 1-0 win.

Scoring a really big, meaningful long-range goal can be among the most intensely joyful experiences that PES has to offer. Sure, under the same circumstances, stabbing the ball over the line from two yards out in the middle of a goalmouth scramble can be just as important. But is it as satisfying? No, never.

I claimed my first win of season 2012 against a team called Heracles Almero. I’m playing in the PES2008 equivalent of La Liga, so I thought I’d have heard of most or all of the teams—but I’d never heard of Heracles Almero.

A quick Google of the name indicates that I’ve never heard of them because they’re really a quite obscure Dutch team. Their real name also seems to be Heracles Almelo. Hmmm all round, really.

The game looked like it was going to be yet another 0-0. After four of the blighters on the bounce I wasn’t too happy. When would I score another goal? When? There is something almost tragic about a 0-0 in football. Nil-nil just isn’t the point of what any game should be about, if that makes sense. I think the Americans had the right idea in the 1970s when they effectively banned 0-0 results from their ill-fated ’soccer’ league at the time.

Bradley was sitting out this game on the bench due to tiredness. I brought him on in the 79th minute. I had a throw-in deep in my own half, and worked the ball across the pitch to him. I ran him a little way forward, crossed the halfway line, shot speculatively… and the ball flew into the net through the CPU keeper.

Not literally through the keeper: on closer inspection the ball passed between his outstretched hands. He should have still saved it, but I was happy enough. Bradley’s sheer power had scored the winning goal. It was his first goal for my Coventry City with his first touch of the game. I’ve had plenty of players in PES with the Middle Shooting ability, but Bradley seems to have the most exquisite long-range power and placement of them all.

This boy is going to be something special. He already is something special. He’s only 21 years old. What will he be like in five seasons? The mind boggles. I might not even bother with Mathieu in this career—and that’s saying something for me. Bradley is Mathieu turned up to 11.

In the long-term, could Bradley become a ‘cheat player’ for me—almost an Elcherino?

I’ll have to watch this situation carefully, but it’s not an issue at the moment and I don’t think it will be. I have always been average at ‘proper’ PES, as this PSP/PS2 version is; I have always managed to play it for the whole PES year without boredom.