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.

Things are changing here on PES Chronicles—hopefully for the better. For the past several months I have chronicled faithfully my day-to-day experiences of playing Pro Evolution Soccer. I could very easily continue in that vein indefinitely, but I feel that things need freshening up. An altered posting schedule will allow me more time to compose (hopefully) better articles.

I’ll still be relating what I’m up to on PES2008 (and on FIFA08). But I’ll be doing it in a different way. After so many seasons of detailed recaps of my progress, complete with diagrams, screenshots, etc., I don’t think there’s any real need or point in doing it all over again. I’ve covered a lot of ground over the past several months. I don’t want to cover it all again and simply end up repeating myself ad infinitum. So I’ll be summarising a lot more than I used to. I’ll just be covering the big highlights.

The new style of posting will also allow me more scope to talk about PES2009 and FIFA09. Over the next two months there’s going to be an increasing amount of rumour, speculation, and hard news emerging from both camps. I’ll be ‘covering’ it all in detail (huh, listen to me, talking as if I’m a proper pseudo-journalistic blogger all of a sudden).

I’m one of the many football game fans who expects both games to be great this year. I have no means of knowing for certain, of course, but I suspect that come September/October, we’re going to be the happiest we’ve ever been with the choice of football games on offer. FIFA09 is going to be a superb evolution of the all-new FIFA franchise—I’d put a very large amount of money on that. And PES2009 should be a triumphant return to form for the tarnished series. Although I do agree with the conventional wisdom which says that it’ll be another year or two before we see what Seabass & co. are really capable of on the new generation of consoles.

On Friday I’ll be looking at all of the rumours and confirmed news about PES2009. I’ll try to sift through it all and reach some kind of conclusion. On Sunday I will do the same for FIFA09. Naturally, in neither case will I forget to mention how I’m doing in the current games of football that currently inhabit my console…

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After completing two Trebles in consecutive seasons—2019 and 2020—it would seem there’s little else to play for in this Master League career. It would seem natural to abandon it and start again with a new team in a new league with a new career path using different players. I have played Master League that way in the past. Around about PES4, I got into the habit of not abandoning ‘completed’ Master League careers. I started playing them indefinitely, all year round—in one case, PES5, literally until the night before PES6 was released.

I’m going to do the same right now. My Coventry City team marches on. There’s lots to do yet. I want to get hold of some of these mouth-wateringly talented Regens that have started cropping up. I’m talking Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Ronaldinho, Lampard, and many others.

But not Gerrard. Unbelievably, Steven Gerrard has signed up to play another year for Barcelona. His age? 41.

Surely this is wrong. It has to be a bug, or an oversight, or something. I can only hope that whatever it is, it doesn’t stop Gerrard finally retiring at the end of the coming season. I need to get him as early as possible so I can develop him and play with him at his peak before FIFA09 and PES2009 are released. It’s a lesser PES year without having Gerrard in my ML team. Middle Shooting is his, uh, middle name. Would he be better than Bradley? That’s what I want to know…

My actual transfer action was pretty poor. I tried for, and failed, to get Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Lampard. I made pretty hefty bids worth a lot of the in-game money. All declined my offer—although, as ever in PES, you never know if the problem lies with the club or the player.

After a couple of weeks of pre-season I still hadn’t bought anybody. My one and only pre-season friendly was against a South American selection—an All-Stars team, in effect. They’re probably the toughest opponents to face in a pre-season friendly, and so it proved again. They thumped me 3-1. A 23-year-old midfielder called Veron had a superb game for them…

I snapped him up in the next week. I’ve always liked Veron in PES. He was one of my star men in my unforgettable PES5 career. I have a feeling he’ll be great for me in this one too. If nothing else, he could be a perfect replacement for Camacho in the right-sided AMF role. Camacho is 32 now and only a couple of years away from having to be retired to the bench. I did get Scholes to act as his replacement but Scholes’ development is coming along very slowly.

Veron turned out to be my only pre-season signing. I did keep trying for Ronaldo & co., but they all steadfastly refused. I think I may have a solution. I don’t like it, but if I really want to get these players I’m going to have to start offering silly money for them. Silly money for me is anything above 20,000 for the transfer, and anything above 2500 for the salary. But I’ve got the cash—I could easily afford it. So why not? I think I will go for it in the mid-season window. Money is no object.