@Madmac79: Even though I've been playing PES5 for a while now, on each game there's always a few of those little, simple moments you speak of that I find worthy of capturing. This is a subtle masterpiece.
Curiously, last night I played Bordeaux - ahem, Aquitaine! - and just like on our first match on the first half of the season, Smicer got injured.
Ah yes, Couto played for Lazio! What an amazing team he was part of back then. "This" Couto is on his pre-retirement tour already; I remember he had a superb statsheet with 91 Defense on PES3 and got downgraded to hell in PES4; in PES5 he starts with only 80 DEF (which quickly became a 79 once the ML started). You can still see flashes of his former brilliance but he's aging much worse than Jorge Costa, who in real life I always thought to be much inferior to Couto.
Appreciate the info about transfers. The AI seems to be as active on CPU-CPU deals as in PES6, which is nice, and I've seen some pretty realistic deals like Simão Sabrosa (Benfica) going to Arsenal. I played through the winter transfer market and only one of my players had an offer: I put one of my reserve CBs on the transfer list and on the very next week he had a loan offer from Fohlen (Borussia Monchengladbach), which curiously is the club he plays for on the PES5 database. I tried to move a few other reserves of mine but got no offers whatsoever.
@mattmid:

Have you discovered a new skill? I've never seen that move before. It's amazing how after so many years we still find new things about these games.
@Meazza84: Well, it's exactly because of what you're saying that I'm speechless when people say that because they don't like/are through with modern PES or FIFA, they don't have "any football game to play". There are dozens of great PESs, each with its own particular depiction of football, each with different teams/rosters; plus one even has patches that recreate football ranging from the last century to the present day, from well-known leagues to the ones we did on Project Odyssey like Iceland or the 2nd Danish division, or even fantasy ones like AMADOR. Damn it, if this isn't enough entertainment to last you for a couple of lifetimes, then I don't know what will...
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I've been having a very specific issue on my PES5 ML adventure, one that I don't think I've ever came upon in this series.
My goalkeeper is Moreira, a decent GK except for his Balance (78): 81 DEF, 86 Response, 80-something GK skills. Good enough for the D2, anyway. However, we've been conceding a lot of goals due to lack of communication between the defensive line and the keeper. Yes, this is a 15-year-old game reproducing a complex footballing concept. I have now understood what was causing it: the Teamwork stat.
Jorge Costa is the only member on my defense with an impressive TW (81, I believe). Couto's is decent but Amequis and Areias' are poor, as well as...Moreira's, with just 67 TW. An example of what happens ingame: last night I conceded one goal in which the ball is crossed from the opp.'s right side, Amequis the RB and Moreira both first decide to try to intercept the ball, then both stay put, each pulling off some very realistic micro-reactions in the process as if to reproduce their indecisiveness ("shall I go or you go? I will!...Ok, you go. But what if I...No, you. Me?..."). In the end, neither goes for the ball and the opportune striker hits it and scores.
Interestingly, pissed off with Moreira after conceding on bunch of variations of this particular "scene", I decide to start Perali instead, who'd be a good goalkeeper if he combined his +80 DEF and Response with better GK Skills (just 72). However, he's got about (only) 5 points more TW than Moreira, and the difference when he's on the pitch is night and day when it comes to communicating well with the defensive line. We're talking about an attribute that I don't think even exists on modern PES and how just 5 TW points can have such an impact. It goes to show how much depth this game has.
I'm in a dilemma now: should I play Moreira, who's only 23 and might evolve into a very good goalkeeper, despite his TW; or play 30-year-old Perali who's never going to improve that horrible GK Skills stat but has slightly better TW, and because of that concedes less "stupid" goals, whilst conceding some less stupid ones that Moreira effortlessly saves?