The9

Hey, I'll play whatever I like better, don't get fanboy-tagging on me.

Funnily enough once I'd run the translation from English to Japanese and back again I was happy to post it, that was kind of the point. I have been thinking of learning Japanese, the only phrases I know at the moment are SHOOOOTOOOOO and HEADING-A. I haven't read the rest of your post, I've been too busy playing PES2009.

I'm quite impressed it's the day of the game and no-one has said what time kick off is yet ? I just checked the email, nothing. On here ? Nothing. So I'll just randomly pitch up at Fleming Park some time before 10 then I suppose ?

Blimey, he's so far off the radar I've never even created him in Pro Evo !

Well, the first thing is that the final game is the same as the demo, so not sure what your issue with having your own opinion rather than someone else's is. You'll forgive me for never having read anything from Thunderbolt games, but what they've said is cobblers anyway. The right stick allows manual passing of any length, on the ground and in the air, in 8 directions. That's about as free as you'd want, given that you can also do a controlled pass towards the nearest teammate in any direction. In PES bad players will pass it reasonably near to the closest player in the selected direction, and good players will pass it accurately. That's pretty much all there is to that. The rail running stuff is nonsense, and a 5 year old criticism that was addressed that long ago by allowing the controlling human to override the player following the straightest path to meet the ball (and allow sprinting to intercept it earlier). And what's that about crying like a little b1tch you've put in Japanese ? Very big of you, but clearly not very clever. No crying here, just lots of proving you really don't know the subject as well as you like to portray. As happened with Fantasista, which I absolutely didn't say you had played, I said you clearly hadn't played, as you rattled on about the irrelevant manual cursors rather than the thing Become a Legend is actually based on from a Japanese PS2 game of summer 2007. Oh and 大きいヘルペス乗られたゴリラの球を吸う . Rob, the reason there's no PC OF is purely Kitserver, the vast number of easily importable graphics already online, and the ease of modding the game using GGS and AFS Explorer. Why do an OF when you can amend the original game code almost as easily ? There's a GREAT PES stats debating website around somewhere too, all the comparisons in all the positions. The stats Db needs some work, but at least it actually matters in the game. Oh and I'm off work on Friday, because having said I'd be renting first, the demo has convinced me I'll be picking it up at midnight again. And I fully expect online to suck (at best), and for Konami to bring out an online transfer update which may well knacker everyone's advance OFs ! The WENB one looks better than PESFan so far, the latter don't seem to have the detail right. PS If anyone's flogging a PS3 cheap I may be interested, bloody import .png mode...

God you don't half type some sh1te. There's been a supercancel button to override the "rail" thing for about 5 years now, the rails are all but irrelevant in PES2009 (other than the logical straight line to the ball being a rail of sorts) and PES2009 is ALL about passing. You clearly haven't played it, just like you hadn't played Fantasista and didn't know what the hell you were talking about there either.

Is Summers still angling for Mingbats on the Saturday night ?

I haven't managed it in 4 days so far...

I'd appreciate it if someone could remove that big ole' ugly scan from the middle of the thread for me now... no idea it was that big. Um, I'm still at a loss to why people don't like PES2009, it's an excellent PES game, totally in the tradition of all their other games (except last year's). I just can't get on with FIFA09 this year, I absolutely hate the bobbly control and turning actions, and I conceded a pathetic goal on the demo where a player was in the six yard box wide of the goal at the far post, dived towards the sideline even further from the goal and travelling in the wrong direction and the ball was powerfully headed into the net off the back of his head in total contravention of all existing laws of physics.

Afghanistan I should think.

I'm amazed you haven't yet clicked that Holmes (along with Lallana) was the thing holding the team together in the first month. I don't want to stray into "Prutton will save us" territory here, but EVERYTHING which gave us a cutting edge went through Holmes before his injury. He provided a stream of decent crosses, as well as holding the ball up, giving us an outlet from defence (the whole of preseason we were hitting crossfield passes to him in order to break quickly, since he's been out we're ponderous and possession-keeping without creating a threat because the opposition gets players back and aren't facing their own goal when we deliver the ball) and he usually beat his man and provided the sort of end product Dyer never has. Losing Holmes without a direct replacement in the same style has meant we've had to totally revamp the pattern of play and the team hasn't adjusted to it yet. I know nothing about Robertson, but I know Dyer wasn't going to fit in our system, failed dismally to replace Holmes in the games he had, and still has some name value to get us a decent trade. Hopefully we come out at the good end of it.

Thats 5 "years"... although the slip may be Freudian.

Based on previous weeks on here, a bunch of knee-jerking "we're doomed"-ness from a bunch of people who really should have worked out that we were probably going to be somewhere in the bottom half this season about 5 months ago, and shouldn't STILL be surprised that we're losing more than we win. And if we win, we'll be the greatest team in history for a week again, like we were after beating Birmingham. I love the implication from Snowballs2 that we really should be beating Doncaster, and that somehow they're crap. It's just genius, they're as competent as anyone else in this league (as are we on our day), but because they don't have a successful history they're somehow an easy target and we're expect to beat them despite having a team full of kids still learning the realities of the CCC and nudging towards a confidence problem. In case you haven't noticed, Wigan have been in the league above us for 5 tears, and currently the mighty Hull, and Fulham, and Stoke are also at a higher level than anyone in the CCC. None of them have much in the way of top flight pedigree, but you don't play their history, you play their current team. I'd take a draw, to be honest. Getting points away can be good for confidence too, and we'd need something different to click to get a win, unless Doncaster don't perform because we're still adjusting to losing Holmes.

Not really too simplistic, Holmes as the outlet ball for Lloyd James was the key all preseason and in the early games, the first game after Holmes got injured James looked terrible because he tried the pass once to Dyer and Dyer didn't keep it in, never mind hold it, get past his man and get in a cross. After that James didn't know what to do with himself when he had the ball, hence loads of hoofs up the line and panicking which made him look worse than he was - the obvious shoulder/arm injury he picked up was preventing him moving freely as well, but it was the lack of a plan B that hurt us most. Even so we scored twice against Ipswich, mostly due to Pekhart's efforts. The following game against Barnsley without either James or Holmes we simply didn't know what the system was meant to be and the strikers were all over the place (especially BWP and McG). Defensively we have a huge gap in front of the back 4 every time we lose the ball as the two shielding the back 4 are usually up the field passing. We look exposed as soon as we give it away. Gillet or Schneiderlin playing well covers that as well as not giving it away as much - though Wotton has held position well when he's been in there.

The money first, medals maybe later attitude is pandemic in football nowadays, the only surprise is that our players who have mostly achieved so little seem to believe they'll get anywhere in the game without even establishing themselves first. It's no use either way, but at least the lazy senior pros had achieved something at some point prior to sitting back and taking the money. I don't know why "mutterings" is needed as if there wasn't a good 6 months' worth of evidence on the pitch, either ! This lot have proven nothing other than if they put the effort it they might be able to get some results, and if they don't put the effort in they have no chance.

Well, that's a rather provocative post, but I have to say I'm impressed with your support for "doing the blatantly stupid thing and putting yourself in harm's way for the sake of appearances". So did your family do the smart thing and get out of the way of the bombing area, or were they just lucky ? Natural selection, anyone ? The analogy, as usual, is tenuous at best, which is why I haven't bothered to address it.

She can play.

Seeing as we've now lost to them 2-1 and, erm, 6-1 in the Cup yesterday, :smt119 but won our other game, I am suggesting you are incorrect.

Well thank crap that 24 hour period has expired. For those who DON'T know, my Facebook status for most of today was the equivalent of me jumping up and down in frustration at using up my 3 posts for the day at 1:30am... ...because of Saint Marco posting that message above in which he has TOTALLY misunderstand what the Fantasista mode I was talking about was about. Firstly, the option to lock on a single player has been in a ton of games, and pretty much all the PES games I've ever played. However, I wasn't talking about that. The Fantasista mode, from WEJLCC07 (for short), was a full career mode, in which you created your player, chose your stronger foot, hairstyle, appearance, allocated a position and some skills for yourself, and ended up on the bench or in the reserves for a (Japanese, which was the language the game was in) J-League 2nd Division team. Depending on whether you were selected or not, you might play, watch (if you were sub) or skip the game and train to gain attribute points. The in-game mode featured you playing as a single player, viewed close-up from behind, with the pitch rotating around you in 360 degrees. In fact, it looked very similar to Libero Grande, which is the first person footy perspective game I couldn't remember the name of yesterday. But the point is, you played the match as one player, you couldn't change your player during the match, there was no setting the tolerance low or anything because it was a completely separate game mode, kind of like watching a single player perspective in a replay. And you had a career, which usually went from J-Lge 2 to J-Lge 1 to Europe, depending on your success. As it was in Japanese I played about a season and a half in J-Lge 2 before I got fed up of being offered a transfer to J Lge 1's bottom 3, and then PES6 came out for Xbox360 the week after so the chipped PS2 got retired. Funnily enough I only deleted the rar file from my laptop last week... Anyway, the point was that Konami's Winning Eleven J-League Club Championship 2007, the Japanese Club version of PES, had something suspiciously resembling FIFA08's "Be A Pro" a full few months before Be A Pro was even released. FWIW I think Be A Pro is probably better, but EA defeintely weren't first in that particular contest (and as I mentioned, Libero Grande built a whole game around the same concept in about 1995 anyway, but without the career mode). Anyway, onto other things, a pretty big PES news day today, with some actual in-game late review version video emerging from Sweden - there's a bit of weirdness, as the CL mode is shown clearly, and there are lists of teams, but Liverpool don't seem to feature in it - though PES2009 has a licensed Cluj ! My suspicion is that the licensed teams in CL are all grouped together, but they're not all on one page, so only SOME of the licensed teams in CL have been seen. But it's all but confirmed that Arsenal and Chelsea WON'T be licensed. On the bright side, you seem to able to include any teams you want in the UEFA CL (and play Exhibitions with the CL ad-boards etc). No idea if BATE Borisov are in though. Vids are here anyway : http://www.winningelevenblog.com/news/new-pes-2009-videos/ The feckers STILL won't go into Edit mode though - although there is a screenshot of edit mode (showing the 4 shirt edit layers) taken from a (rubbish) Spanish magazine (on the right, half way down here The translation also says there are 32 licensed teams in the CL, which may be sort of true as there are probably 32 licensed teams in the game, but they're not the 32 teams that are actually in the CL this season, cos various national licensing regulations (and EA/FIFA) prevent more than 2 Prem clubs and ANY German clubs being in PES. Oh, and the Serie A license has definitely gone, but apparently Konami has licenses for all of the Serie A clubs anyway, so if you can put up with an "England League" style "Calcio" logo, you'll still have licensed Italian sides. Oh yeah, and Ronaldinho's white boots with the dark inside-foot piece are in the game too. The boots licensing seems to have massively improved - AND the boots look better than the ones on my FIFA09 demo. The Vapors on FIFA's Drogba look like clogs ! I think that's it for today. God I hope this game doesn't suck, I'm dying for PES2009 to be good; I was playing the FIFA09 demo earlier and it does seem a bit crisper and smoother than last season, but that may just be me playing as Chelsea not Saints !!! Oh and hi Dan, remind me not to pass to you on Sunday ! Double-oh, I have to say Lawrenson wouldn't be my choice either, but the only commentary so far seems to be last year's, so that could change. Brackley and Brooking were cool, but having loved Jon Kabira's Winning Eleven "SHOOOOOOOOTOH"s for 4 years in Japanese I can't say it makes much difference to me. "CHANCES-NAAAH" ! "HEADING-A" !!! Go Kabira !

I used to meet up with a crowd of anywhere up to about 20 people in the pub before games when I was travelling down from South Wales to watch matches before I moved here, and when I was trying to think of someone to text to meet up with before the Blackpool game I literally couldn't think of 2 people I knew would be going. It's got to the point now where I'm chuffed if I see one person I know ! Having said that, the football's probably more positive than anything Strachan or any of the previous 10 years' managers before him put on the pitch, so I'm enjoying that loads. Shame Lloyd James hasn't sussed that Dyer's not going to reach the same balls as Holmes yet though, and he looked lost without the 40 yard outlet once he'd hit a few over Dyer's head. Kelvin at least stopped kicking goal kicks at Dyer after half an hour too..! And while I'm here, can we have Jake Thomson back please ? He's been our best right sided player this season from the first half in Cardiff as far as I can tell.

Some of this stuff makes me laugh. Most of the time we're playing more attacking, exciting and entertaining football than I've seen for years, with a bunch of young players - in terms of the on-field product the whole team is a work in progress to be watched and seen grow (or shrink), and it couldn't be more interesting for actual football fans (or even "just" Saints fans who don't care about other teams). However for some reason we seem to have turned about half of the sell-out Prem crowd into a bunch of gloryhunting results chasers with a massive swathe of temporary big-game attendees. Weird that about 30000 people wanted to see us beat Sheff Utd last season but only half of them want to know what happened next. Of course a lot of people are skint due to the financial climate and can't afford to go, and midweek games are always tricky for some with work commitments, but equally, plenty of them will be conveniently hiding behind the Lowe Excuse, just as they did when we went down - and didn't come back when he left. Frankly I don't believe a single one of them, there are plenty of other, LEGITIMATE reasons not to be going, so grow a set and tell the truth, eh ? "I can't be bothered" is alright, just try and work out why not. Unfortunately for Saints, we seem to have a lot of floaters who are steered purely by results, and results aren't quite there at the moment, though we've been competitive in every game. A few wins should hopefully see the crowd pick up. However, even with fewer people, the support last night was excellent in places. Admittedly it was dire in others ("Swing Lowe" starting midmatch for about 5 seconds with us 2-1 down wasn't shaping up to be a highlight), but the 15 minute long "Red Army" not long after was far more useful to the kids and just about saved it for me. And trust me, people were going as nuts as ever when we scored. It's strange to me that people are using the supposed weakness of the on-field performances - which they're not even getting to see - to justify not going. I know someone who went last night for the first time in a while and completely loved the whole thing like before, despite the drop in status since the last time they went. And when did we EVER score a goal like the one at QPR ??? There's a lot going for the club on the pitch, and you want to be there now for the next time when you hear "where were you when you were sh1t", right ?

Hmna, restricted as I am to 3 posts a day for as long as I'm a tightwad... Konami's presentation skills I couldn't care less about. The CL license I couldn't really care about, but at least there will be a decent standalone mode instead of playing Konami Cup all the time. Gameplay is expected to be PES5 (WE10)-esque, in that it's slower. Which is a good thing. More to the point, you can't just bloody dribble past everyone as was SO easy in 2008. There are also licensing issues WITHIN CL mode, cos with Liverpool and Man U "official", apparently Arsenal and Chelsea aren't licensed, due to the 2 Prem clubs per game rule - and Konami have also lost the La Liga Spanish license (rumoured 7 Spanish clubs licensed) and there's also a question about the Serie A license which we won't know about for a while. Though the current (official) PESUnites website lists FIGC (Italian FA) and the Italian players' association as licenses, there's no mention of the Serie A license, only AC Milan by name. St Marco's mate who played it at Leipzig will also know that WENB have been reporting for about 6 weeks that the Leipzig build was really early and actually very similar to PES2008, but also that they themselves, and most of the games media, already had more advanced later builds to preview from. Having said that, WENB's credibility took a clobbering last year with their failure to report on 2008's failings. That wasn't Saints winning the CL, that was PES United. And anyone picking either PES OR FIFA automatically at the moment is a numpty, I hated PES2008 and actually bought FIFA, but while it was decent, found it slow and samey after a few games, and I HATE the cartoon faces. The FIFA09 demo plays EXACTLY the same at 08 as far as I can tell from a few games of that, and I won't be buying it even for all the multiplayer online stuff without seeing a few games of someone else at it first. I am shaking my head in resignation at St Marco's nonsense about Konami "copying" Be A Pro too, presumably he's never heard of Konami's Fantasista mode in J-League Winning Eleven Club Championship 2007 on PS2, which came out months before FIFA 08 with Be A Legend last year - not to mention all the games in the past with single-player viewpoints back into the 90s and probably before. But I can't argue that PES lacks game modes - but to be honest I couldn't be arsed to play a whole season in FIFA08 anyway it got so repetitive, so both could improve. Also, in my FIRST FIFA09 demo match, I conceded a diving back header from a player diving out of the side of the six yard box (ahead of the direction of the ball) in a manner that utterly defied physics, which told me nothing had changed on that front. Sorry GuttedAnt, but it's Lawrenson again. No-one can tell from videos how the gameplay will be, especially regarding PES where the keepers were trash on PES2008 and really need to be better, but might be worse from low-level "goal action" videos. FIFA keepers are much better though, far more realistic and effective last year. Holland players names have been correct since about PES4, or if not, it's no effort to edit them anyway, what's the big deal ? At least they're not PES3(?)s Oranges123 !!! And Robsk, I'm assuming you played PES2008 on PC, which was probably the only version worth anything, cos the 360 version was awful and unplayable, especially online, and I didn't even get as far as editing myself properly I was so peeved with the game. It just flat out wasn't a challenge, wasn't football, wasn't fun, and wasn't even bloody finished. FWIW PES2009 is believed to have far more kits for editing (70+ templates and 4 layers, plus as Hull have the same kit style as Saints we'll be able to do a perfect Saints kit). They also have DECENT, REALISTIC LOOKING officially licensed adidas boots (again), plus Nike and Puma styles as well, in a variety of colours. I'm really hoping we get the 36 boot edit slots back even if we're fixed to licensed boots plus 4 plain colours. My adipure black/white are in anyway, so I'm happy! Funnily enough I haven't heard anything about the Camera capture of kits this year, maybe they've hoiked it, or maybe as it's not new it's just not publicised, but you can sponsor import and badge edit/import (at least on PS3, the 360 needs the new functionality of the new dashboard for USB importing). There are 40 picture slots for badges etc as well as the pixel editor, and .png files and transparency are supported. Which of course all means jack all if the gameplay sucks. Like some others I love my PES, but I think I'll be renting first this year because last time was SUCH a letdown. But if they produce PES2008 with slowed down gameplay, a good edit mode and decent AI and keepers, it won't take ALL that much to turn me back into a PESfan. I miss my Winning Eleven though.

Funnily enough when I was in Guimaraes during Euro 2004 for the Bulgaria v Italy game it absolutely lobbed it down non-stop for about 12 hours and the whole place was awash, one of the wettest games I've ever been to (along with Saints v Villa circa 1992 and Newport County v Blackpool in the FA Cup the week Brett Ormerod left Blackpool to sign for Saints).

I'm aching like hell today, apparently my recovery is so slow now I don't even begin to hurt for 36 hours...

As we're already tied into a 5 year deal with Umbro who only produce kits for one season you can guarantee we WILL be doing that in 2010, whether it's branded as "special" or not. Incidentally, Portsmouth's crappy all blue and gold effort this season is their 110th anniversary kit, which is a pretty lame-o reason to have a "special" kit. At least 125 is something resembling a milestone. Oh, and I hate the badge. The black background is unnecessary and even though it reflects the first badge looks horrendous, the laurel wreath is a hackneyed cliche 120 years later, the crown is, well, just... well, nothing to do with Saints in the 21st Century and the only good bits about it are the bits which are on the current badge because they're distinctive compared to other club badges. Having said all that I wouldn't be against a version of the old crest with the Mayflowers on it, and I'd even put up with white with a red sash (as long as the shorts and socks were the 1888 YMA traditional colours) or red/white quarters from the St Mary's YMA days either Unfortunately the first 42 years as Southampton FC saw the red and white stripes alongside various combinations of navy shorts and socks, which I don't think we should be revisiting even for one season. We should probably lay off the 3/4 length knickerbockers too. And use a crossbar and an 18 yard penalty area instead of an arc.