Season 2 has come to a close, and with it a mixed bag of fortunes.
To summarize, board objectives were to finish in a Europa League Spot, and to reach the last 16 of the FA Cup, we achieved both of these targets and as a result I have been offered a new contract, I was offered the managers job at Dortmund, which was tempting, but the challenge at Palace remains unfulfilled, for now.
A 6th placed finish, secured with a 3-2 win on the final day of the season, the late winner edging out Liverpool who also won, and would have leapfrogged us if we hadn’t have picked up all 3 points.
We reached the FA Cup final after a nail-biting epic semi-final showdown against Man City, the game finishing 4-3 to us, the final was vs Spurs, a team who has won the title and finished second in the previous 2 seasons, a very tight tense game saw us lose 1-0 due to a keeper mistake, a good save but parried out to the edge of the 6 yard box for Kane to smash home into an empty net for the win, our first domestic trophy under my stewardship remains elusive.
Overall it was a satisfactory season, Professional level still offers up plenty of challenge and no real need to move to World Class until I’ve won a trophy, the game continues to play superbly with the FIFER Realism Mod v1.3.
André Kramaric cemented his position as our first choice striker, having a great season and finishing second in the top scorer charts with 23 goals, Zaha is becoming a so-so performer, having spent large periods of the season out with various injuries, the emergence of youth promotee David Boateng in CDM is also promising, having scored a few goals on the way to the FA cup final, also a very exciting prospect in Schinkel, another youth player who shows great development and potential.
We made several pre-season signings, bringing in backup for a few positions and offloading some end of contract fringe players, we were awarded £34 mil for our league finish, so had around £42 mil in total to spend on new players.
My three new signings are shown above, Toko-Ekambi, a strong powerful CF rated 81 OVR, will serve as backup to Kramaric, but came at a price as I had to do a cash + player swap, and they wanted my fledgling star midfielder Boateng, so he left, Tarkowski, an 81 rated CB to replace the retiring Gary Cahill, and GK Andrada to replace the flapping Guaita who cost us the FA Cup, no mercy shown there.
Palace have also signed a new sponsorship deal with Netflix, and have new kits to boot for season 3:
One of the joys of FIFA 20 is the shooting and variety of shots on offer, you can hit a very similar shot 20 times over but every one feels different, takes a different trajectory or spin, depending on player, striking angle, power etc, and you can really tell when a thumper leaves your boot and is destined for the top corner.
A nice hit from Milivojevic (CM):
We are competing in the International Champions Cup pre-season tournament, a good run out for some of the returning loanees, youth players and new signings to bed in, and i also want to try a new formation, have been playing a 4-3-3 of sorts with 2 wide wingers and a lone CF, but want to try and use 2 CF’s as was my traditional go-to formation in any football game, I always prefer having 2 CF’s to feed off each other, it’s just moulding the right players into the new shape, this tournament will be perfect for trialing those ideas
To finish off a few goals from the back end of last season:
FIFAFX.com 
Paul – Indeed as variety is everywhere in the game. An example being corners. This season I have scored 3 goals from corners all from different scenarios. One was from a power header from the centre spot. Another was a glancing header into the bottom corner of the goal and another was when the keeper came out to catch the ball but him and a defender had a mix up as to who was going for the ball and allowed me to head the ball into an empty net. But yes going back to shooting it is the best mechanics I have ever seen in a football game.
I have four games left of season 2 and set to finish 15th in the Championship. Am settled back on Pro level with Tactical Defending as you are right it is so much better and equally as challenging as World Class with legacy
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Good to hear you’re having a good time with the game Darryl, I remember you and I closely mirroring each others Careers last year before you stopped playing g, hopefully this year with its superior game play will.keep you interested for many seasons.
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Paul – Yes we did mirror each other last year. I totalled 10 seasons before the juice ran out, which is a long time in Fifa. I don’t have any expectations or any ambitions this year other than to just enjoy the game, which I am doing a lot.
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Yeah I notched up 11 enjoyable seasons, and that was on the vanilla PS4 game, the Modded PC version of FIFA20 is another level.
The ability to change kits was one massive downside, but on PC as shown above its all possible.
I really cant ever see me playing PES ever again, there’s just no need.
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Paul – the Milivojevic strike is a long-ranger in my book. I’ve had a few from that exact distance and the feeling of YESSSS is what makes it.
What sharp looking kits those are, this is a playground for you and no mistake.
I’m still on vanilla gameplay and haven’t even checked the Fifer DIscord for a few days, is it out yet? I’ll grab it when it is of course but I’m really enjoying it regardless. Having a few fouls too
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And re. the ‘will I ever play PES again’ thing, right now I don’t see the need either. Come the summer I bet I’ll want to have my traditional busman’s holiday with a few footy games, but it’s just as likely I’ll be in the midst of a 15-season CM. Leeds is still intended as a preamble to my main CM
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Got 3 weeks off starting Monday, verryyyyyyy tempted to get Fifa 20.
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NG – the kits are satisfactory, few details I’d like to tweak but pretty much there. If you ever want any just shout.
The Milivojevic strike was the first in a run if about 5 or 6 goals from there or there abouts, 22 yarders are plentiful if you catch them right in the right context.
No the FIFER Mod V2 isnt out yet. Next few days apparently. Of course the good thing with frosty is having profiles so easy to switch between v1.3, 2.0 and vanilla
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Do it Lloyd.
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NG – what team/division you looking at for your ‘main’ CM then?
I still fancy a Bundesliga or serie a CM at some point too
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Lloyd – best FIFA in years for me and a great footy game in its own right.
Paul – yes there were plenty of great goals in your compilation. I’m getting more and more involved with Leeds but for so many reasons I will want to start again elsewhere and I might fancy another country entirely. But I think a League Two to Prem challenge would be a classic experience I couldn’t get in another league setup, so we’ll see
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NG – Maybe do a Dario Grady and take Crewe on, or for the ultimate challenge take hopeless bottom of the league Stevenage to Euro glory?
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love the goals compilation Paul, makes the game look so exciting. Notice the bulk of your attacks come down the middle – is wingplay a bit less effective than on 19, or just your normal playing style?
I think we all suspect that not-Greg is still playing PES2020 on the sly, ready to spring one of those epic ‘Best Game Ever’ videos with cheesy rock music at us one of these days!!!
Just picked up FIFA20 myself Lloyd, it was half price in the PS store at £30, probably still is. Want to finish off my long 19 career mode before getting fully immersed in it, but looking forward to a few weekend matches on it with my son, who is unbelievably excited at the prospect of a new FIFA
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Cheers Abbeyhill. If you’re enjoying FIFA 19 then you’ll love 20. It even has NG playing beyond 3 matches!!!
I do utilise wing play too but playing with a 4-3-3 formation means the wingers are actually more LWF and RWF so start in advanced attacking positions so build up play tends to come.down the middle then out wide in the final 3rd.
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abbeyhill – sadly I’m not secretly playing PES2020 or any other PES, I say sadly because we all know the ideal qualities that PES embodies in our collective hearts, and no matter how you cook it, it no longer does. I’ll be interested to see what the PES2021 demo looks like only to see the full release be completely changed again.
FIFA20 has brought long-rangers and individuality. The foul count has dropped from PES2020’s average 1.5 per match to about 0.5, but that’s a minimal change. Everything else is on the plus side. If the two games had comparison hexagons FIFA’s would easily overreach PES’s.
Ad the secret winner here is perhaps my move to the PC gaming platform. Death Stranding might have been the last game I will ever buy for the PS4, and the PS5 specs will have to be great to tempt me.
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NG – I’m not even going to bother with anything to do with PES 2021, no news lookups, no demo download, no purchase, it just is not worth it. We all know the route Konami take with their game nowadays, and whatever is shown in the demo will not be the game that we would buy, so pointless.
FIFA has the game play, presentation, graphics, audio, and a solid career mode, there is absolutely nothing PES can offer that is as good as or better than FIFA.
I too have not turned my PS4Pro on since before xmas, I tend to play one game at a time, and that’s FIFA on PC, I haven’t even taken the shrinkwrap off COD or Man of Medan for PS4.
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Wholeheartedly agree right now, and the great thing is that even if EA go and mess up FIFA21, FIFA20 has legs in it and then some. I think I’ll still be learning and finding my feet on Professional for a good while yet. And then I STILL have to dig into Frosty Editor myself and tinker with things if I can. Just focused on playing and enjoying right now.
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not=Greg – aha, if you told us it would not be a secret!
Fully agree about PC gaming, it’s just as quick and convenient as consoles these days with better graphics and lots of fun scope for fiddling around. Not gaming related but I’ve spent the last few days trying to optimise energy consumption of my laptop, learning how to undervolt the CPU and its cache, drive it into deeper C states, enabling HIPM on the SSD etc. Obviously the likes of Turf will be experts in this kind of stuff but all new to me
Shame they never fixed fixture congestion on FIFA19, after a gruelling FA cup 4th round win at Burnley with a last minute pen I now seem to have a league game against Boro the same Saturday afternoon!
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Abbeyhill – The fixture congestion was supposed to have been largely fixed, but requires a new career to be started after the patch.
It still rears up in FIFA 20 now and then but nowhere near as bad, and if there is a spate of games within a few days of eachother, there’s the option to load up RDBM and your career save and manually edit the fixture date and move a game back a few days, this isn’t cheating, just a workaround for a bug, haven’t done it myself yet though.
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Paul – although it’s a bit shit I am still quite looking forward to coping with the challenge. Might recall a couple of loanees and promote a couple of youth team players to get some sort of team together for the afternoon’s second match
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Do a liverpool and field an under 21 side and still win!!
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NG – this may be of interest!
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thoroughly enjoyed my first few matches of FIFA20 this weekend. Although it’s hard to read too much into co-op games with a 7 year old I got the impression there’s a bit more scope for pace, dribbling and long shots compared to FIFA19 without sacrificing the rugged sim-like gameplay too much
plus Survival Mode, where you lose a player each time you score a goal, is highly entertaining!
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Abbeyhil, the dribbling this year and the recognition of stats, pace, dribbling, technique, acceleration etc is there in abundance, in absolute stark contrast to PES, dribbling is a joy to use!!
and shots from distance and variety of shots are superb too!
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abbeyhill – it certainly feels heavier and more serious to my palate, the acid test of a footy game’s seriousness being ‘does it “allow” 0-0s to happen more than once in a blue moon?’ and it certainly does.
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I had a superb 0-0 against Spurs last night, and have had several over my 2.5 seasons so far.
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