Northern Ireland Campaign (PES2010)

[ZeekLTK]

Backstory: I've had Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer games since WE8 (2004) and the most recent version I have is PES 2010.

Throughout the years I've played 8 World Cups, complete with full qualifying. The results were as follows:

World Cup Results
Champion	Score	Runner Up	Third Place	Score	Fourth Place
France	2-2	Holland	Japan	2-0	Senegal
Georgia	3-0	France	Norway	4-2	Costa Rica
Cote d'Ivoire	1-0	France	Turkey	2-0	Greece
Georgia	2-0	United States	Sweden	1-0	Colombia
Norway	3-2	Mali	Cote d'Ivoire	1-0	Georgia
Norway	3-2	Senegal	Romania	1-0	Bosnia-Herzegovina
England	1-0	Argentina	Australia	3-3	France
Argentina	4-2	Nigeria	Brazil	1-0	Holland

These are the number of times each team has even qualified to the World Cup:

Spoiler

8 times
Norway
France
Holland

7 times
Cote d'Ivoire
Brazil

6 times
England
Argentina
Nigeria
Australia
Romania
Morocco
South Korea

5 times
United States
Turkey
Costa Rica
Portugal
Uruguay
Russia
Italy
Germany
Spain
Mexico

4 times
Georgia
Japan
Sweden
Serbia & Montenegro
South Africa
Tunisia
Chile
Czech Republic
Cameroon
Iran
Finland

3 times
Senegal
Mali
Greece
Colombia
Togo
Denmark
Hungary
Paraguay
Austria
Croatia
Jamaica
Bulgaria
Suriname
Switzerland
Egypt
Ukraine
Saudi Arabia

2 times
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Scotland
Poland
Slovenia
Belgium
Wales
Ireland
Mozambique
Angola
Ghana

1 time
Peru
Honduras
Iceland
Canada
Congo DR
Slovakia
Trinidad & Tobago
China
Uzbekistan
Latvia
Burkina Faso

0 times
Albania
Algeria
Bahrain
Belarus
Bolivia
Cape Verde Islands
Congo
Curacao
Ecuador
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Estonia
Gabon
Guadeloupe
Guinea
Indonesia
Iraq
Israel
Kuwait
Lithuania
Montenegro
New Zealand
North Korea
Northern Ireland
Oman
Panama
Qatar
Serbia
Syria
Thailand
United Arab Emirates
Venezuela

So, getting to the point of all this - you can divide the teams up into "tiers" based on this. So I'm going to play thought a "single player campaign" that I've created myself to see if I can "achieve glory" with the team I select.

The tournament's format will be:

Spoiler

Level 1
-32 teams
---all teams who have never qualified to a World Cup
-World Cup style tournament
---8 groups of 4, top 2 advance to 16 team knockout round


Level 2
-24 teams
---all semifinalists from Level 1 advance + 20 teams who have qualified only 1 or 2 time
-----excluding Bosnia-Herzegovina - they reached semifinals of a World Cup so I bumped them up to Level 4.
-Old World Cup style tournament
---6 groups of 4, top 2 + best third place teams advance to 16 team knockout round


Level 3
-16 teams
---all semifinalists from Level 2 + 12 teams who have qualified only 3 times
-----excluding Senegal, Mali, Greece, Colombia, Togo; all have advanced to the quarterfinals or further in previous World Cups and are bumped up to Level 4.
-Euro Cup style tournament
---4 groups of 4, top 2 advance to 8 team knockout round


Level 4
-16 teams
---all semifinalists from Level 3 + 6 teams who have been bumped up to Level 4 + 6 teams who have qualified 4 times
-----excluding Georgia, Japan, Sweden, South Africa; all have advanced to the quarterfinals or further in previous World Cups and are bumped up to Level 5.
-Euro Cup style tournament
---4 groups of 4, top 2 advance to 8 team knockout round


Level 5
-16 teams
---all semifinalists from Level 4 + 4 teams who have been bumped up to Level 5 + 8 teams who have qualified 5 times
-----excluding United States, Turkey; both have finished third or higher in previous World Cups and are bumped up to Level 6.
-Euro Cup style tournament
---4 groups of 4, top 2 advance to 8 team knockout round


Level 6
-16 teams
---champion and runner up from Level 5 + 2 teams who have been bumped up to Level 6 + 10 teams who have qualified 6 or more times
-Euro Cup style tournament
---4 groups of 4, top 2 advance to 8 team knockout round

Each group stage will be single round robin (only play each team once) and knockout round will be one-game with normal extra time and then PKs if necessary.

Basically I have to reach the semifinals of each tournament for Levels 1-4 to keep advancing, and then I must reach the championship game of Level 5 to advance, and then win the championship game at Level 6.

Obviously I will be trying to win each level anyways, but at the bare minimum the goal is to advance to the next level, so I'll keep going even if I lose in the semifinals or the title game. However, if I fail to advance then I will either just end the dynasty, or I might pick a new team who is still alive and play as them.

Since I am starting at Level 1 (teams who have never qualified to one of my PES World Cups) - I have to pick one of the Level 1 teams.

I've chosen Northern Ireland.

[ZeekLTK]

Level 1 Draw

Group A
Israel
Belarus
Curacao
Congo

Group B
Guadeloupe
Iraq
Ecuador
Serbia

Group C
United Arab Emirates
North Korea
Equatorial Guinea
Oman

Group D
Lithuania
Kuwait
Northern Ireland
El Salvador

Group E
Bolivia
Venezuela
Thailand
Algeria

Group F
Gabon
New Zealand
Indonesia
Guinea

Group G
Syria
Montenegro
Cape Verde Islands
Estonia

Group H
Albania
Qatar
Panama
Bahrain

[ZeekLTK]

Level 1 - Preview

Group D
Lithuania
Kuwait
Northern Ireland
El Salvador


Coach's Corner:
Well, it could have been better, but it could have been worse. It's an average group. We think Kuwait will be our easiest opponent while Lithuania will be the most difficult. Our predictions are to beat Kuwait, lose to Lithuania, and beat El Salvador - 6 points should be plenty to advance.

Most of these teams are new to PES. Kuwait only recently tried to qualify to World Cup 8, and failed - finishing dead last with 0 points in a qualifying group featuring Iran, Uzbekistan, and Oman. They scored just 1 goal and conceded 12 to wind up with a -11 goal difference.

Lithuania and El Salvador are even newer. Neither team was created in time for the last World Cup and as such neither have participated in qualifying. We believe Lithuania will present a challenge while El Salvador is mostly a wild card, it'll be interesting to see how we stack up against both.

Overall I'm pretty confident heading into this group and look forward to seeing how far we can go.

[ZeekLTK]

Level 1 - Match 1 vs Kuwait

[bhurst99]

Good luck! I'll be following.

[ZeekLTK]

Level 1 - Match 1 Recap

Northern Ireland 2
Kuwait 3

Lithuania 1
El Salvador 1


Coach's Corner:
Well, it couldn't have gotten much worse. We lost our opening game to what was suppose to be our "easiest" opponent.

Even worse, since the other teams drew, we are now basically in a "win or go home" situation - if we lose, we will be eliminated because Lithuania will have 4 points + one of Kuwait/El Salvador will have 4+ points, and with just 3 points left to get, we won't be able to catch them.

So now we've go to prepare for Lithuania, who I expect to be the most difficult team we face in the group stage, with no room for error.

I felt like the major problem against Kuwait was defensively, we ran a 4-4-2 and I didn't think there was enough support in the middle, once one defender got beat, the whole defense got beat.

So we're going to change to a 3-5-2 and get rid of our wingbacks, putting them as a "first line of defense" in the form of defensive midfielders. So now we'll essentially have 5 players in the middle of the field with 2 up front and 3 behind them. Hopefully this will help us clean up the sloppy defending so that if one guy gets beat, he'll have someone behind him to slow down the attack.

I hate doing this now since Lithuania likes to attack the wings, and this new formation means we've essentially pulled out from defending the wings (although we now have more bodies in the box to stop crosses)... but we just can't risk letting the middle fall apart like it did (constantly) against Kuwait. So we'll see what happens...

Offensively, we got 2 goals, so we're going to try to keep it up and keep attacking how we did. All the pressure is on now to beat Lithuania!

[ZeekLTK]

Level 1 - Match 2 vs Lithuania

[ZeekLTK]

Level 1 - Match 2 Recap

Northern Ireland 5
Lithuania 0

El Salvador 3
Kuwait 0


Coach's Corner:
The formation change paid off, big! Lithuania either wasn't expecting it or simply couldn't handle it as we steam rolled them to get back into contention for a spot in the knockout round.

To be fair, it wasn't a blowout like the scoreline indicates. We luckily avoided falling behind several times as their strikers missed a number of chances and then we utilized some individual brilliance to take a lead - David Healy scored the opener completely on his own. Then some sloppy defending gave us the space we needed to squeeze in a second goal.

After that, it was still pretty tightly contested until the last ten minutes of the game. Then the floodgates opened. We scored on a routine cross, and then they inexplicably brought us down in the box for a penalty kick. We missed that but luckily the ball came right back for an easy tap in off the rebound. And then finally some comical defending on their part allowed us to chip in a very cheeky goal to make it a "five star performance". But really the extra late goals made it look easier than it was, it was still a difficult match but I'm proud we pulled it out.

Had Kuwait won in the other game, we would have only needed a draw to advance from the final game, but instead El Salvador thumped them 3-0 to set up a nervy ending to the group stage. Here are the scenarios:

-If we win, we advance
-If we draw, we will still advance as long as Kuwait does not beat Lithuania, but we would be eliminated if Kuwait wins
-If we lose, we're out

Since the 3-5-2 worked so well here, I see no point in changing it. We'll make some changes to account for fatigue and whatnot, but we'll be running the same tactics against El Salvador and hoping for the best.