The9

I do wonder which matches people are watching sometimes. Jaidi dealt perfectly comfortably with everything in the air, facing his own goal and on the ground on Saturday (albeit only against Orient who created one chance), but was allowed the ball and showed his weakness in creating chances for us from his own half. So now he's past it. On Tuesday Martin struggled to show composure under pressure when facing his own goal, distributed the ball to various stands, and vaguely competently handled a not-very impressive Prem League front two who rarely got the ball in the first place - except the one time they scored and the other time they had a free shot 6 yards out - and now he's the second coming. Mentalism.

For some reason I now have a lot less patience with the side STILL doing exactly what they did to drop points last season, despite us adding a few new faces. Last season it was impatience in the face of a significant improvement over August and September. THIS season it's bewilderment that we don't appear to have improved on last season, even though for most of last season (Oct-May) we had Play-Off form. Underpinning all that is the knowledge that we've probably been the better side in each game so far, yet have only won one of them.

On the contrary, Jaidi has loads of composure on the ball, he's just not very good at hitting wonderful 40 yard passes, which might be one of the reasons he's a centre-back.

I thought Martin was decent in the air (though we conceded from a headed knock-down) and utterly petrified with the ball when facing his own net, just whacking it absolutely anywhere if under even the remotest kind of pressure, and sometimes even when not. A low-risk approach, but hardly impressive. He looked scared to try anything and utterly out of his depth in places, very much the Conference South player turned pro - but the confidence will only come, if it comes at all, with game time. Bit of a dilemma, that.

I may pre-order and cancel then. Though I may just not bother, just as I may just not bother doing the whole player and team creation thing if it's not very good (or I don't have time for the argument).

But that's... DISHONEST !? And you've left out the bit about cancelling your pre-order. When's the release now anyway, keep hearing rumours it's changed...?

I'll just quote this one too... for context. Oh, I already did. So hang on, if you DIDN'T EVEN OWN FIFA07, how could you possibly know it was better than the equivalent PES game ? ...and other dangerously simple logical deconstructions of your FIFA fanboyism...

Oopsie, too late.

You'd better start editing your previous posts pretty rapidly then !

Let's face it, as I made an entire 40 man squad for the Saints Innernet FC team back in 2006 on PES for PS2 (facial appearances, hairstyles, long/short sleeves, accurately created boots allocated to each player, correct heights, weights, and ratings for ALL player skills), I made every nation in the 2006 World Cup squad with authentic kits (h/a/gk h/gk a/number styles) and added a load of created players on Winning Eleven 10, and for PES2009 spent all night making a Saints badge, kit and squad on the dire game before I even played a match, I think it's fair to assume therefore that if *I* can wait for Creation Centre, anyone can wait for it. Why pay approx £15 more for the game for the chance to create players and teams which based on last year's Gameface to In-Game migration will suffer greatly from loss of detail and accuracy in the process, and which you can't even use until the game is out ? Rumour has it the online Creation Code code works from Sep 2nd. It will, of course, then stop working altogether in launch week, as FIFA's servers die a hideous death as usual and no-one can use anything for weeks afterwards. Probably. More likely there will be a swathe of Creation Centre codes out there anyway.

Yes, it's what most normal people who have played the games in the last 10 years are saying - you however said FIFA was better than PES two full years before that, hence you being a FIFA Fanboy. PS : it's "cue".

The *entire* stand-front on both Kingsland and Itchen were completely devoid of sponsors this week, but there were a few boards in front of the stand-front areas, so it wasn't any kind of "Markus" thing. They were hardly populated the previous week when we were live on tv either, but there were a few taken up. There are, nevertheless, massive swathes of the ground where we've recently had adverts (eg last season) that are currently not taken up, for whatever reason.

Try http://www.myp2p.eu to see if they have it listed on the Football tab (noting that events are listed by start time in central europe)...

You underestimate the impatience and expectation level of our mongs.

Weirdly last season's equivalent game showed us that the basic (at the time rubbish League One) team without any of the new signings except Lambert and Harding was actually quite good at competing with Birmingham.

Yeah, quite. Remember Waiting for Waigo, anyone...? I'll be surprised if he's eligible for Saturday, the club are just using this as a tool to shift more tickets, pretty sure he won't be playing - though having an Italian in charge might actually help us on this one.

My favourite thing in this thread is seeing how many people propose songs they don't even know the originals for. "Come A Chameleon" ? Seriously ?

Did all this for "Puncheon Jaidi" 6 months ago.

Name names, I can't remember the specific shot in question.

You'd be inclined to think he'd pick Dickson over Harding if that was the case. All our full backs have had at least one poor game so far, Butterfield was dreadful v Bournemouth AND on Saturday, giving his man far too much room to turn and cross.

Puncheon's got great ability and gets the ball more than anyone, especially when we're not playing well. If he passed the ball when he first sees the pass rather than 2 seconds later he'd be about 50% better, but he has a touch of Fernandes Syndrome, and if any opposing side ever realises he ALWAYS cuts inside on his left, he'll be in the Conference before you know it. Having said that, he's already shown he has great finishing and only needs to be a little quicker releasing the ball to stop winding people up. And anyone could hit the roof when rushing a shot. I'm slightly concerned people are using "wearing jeans and not showing approriate respect" as a stick to beat him with. Which really has nothing to do with how good a footballer he is, and isn't even on the scale as far as footballer misdemeanours go.

45 mins of dominating and not scoring enough of our chances followed by 45 mins of panicking and whacking it at Lambert. Just about covers it for me. Annoying.

This is the first year I'm going to FIFA by default and waiting to see if PES has a contender, rather than the other way around. The last two years I've reserved judgement til I've played both - with FIFA09 and PES2009 I bought both and only played FIFA, with FIFA10 I only bought that. The bit I'm most looking forward to is the create a team and online Player Creation Centre - I've been waiting for years for a way to get a PC-based editor to feed a football game WITHOUT needing a third party app, and the chance to share those players and team(s?) online. It should be great - IF they've removed the cartoony-looking "default" players.

You need to be more accurate with the + pointers on your picture as it uses them to map your face pic onto the model. If you put the crosses at the outside of your nostrils and the tip of the nose in the right place then you won't get the shadowing effect around the side of the nose because the photo will be stretched the correct amount and the folds in the picture will be where the folds in the 3D model go. Also, use the colour palette/brightness to tone your skin to one of the in-game skin shades so the circle "face in the hole" effect disappears. I found using the 2 different pictures was probably the best way to get an accurate pic. It's still a bit flawed because you can't control things like neck length, face shape (much), and what happens to your eyes when it puts you actually in-game, but you can do a pretty decent representation. One last thing - once you've set your face parameters with the crosses, etc. DON'T change them with the sliders, they're the right sizes on average from your two photos and you shouldn't be able to improve them! This is me, kinda :

Well, I've learned two things from that statement. One is who is running the club now, and the other is who was running the club two weeks ago. So everything Cortese had done was sanctioned by Markus. I'm not sure whether that makes things better or worse. Other than that, Cortese is clear that absolutely nothing has changed, and I guess that must include my opinions on a large number of the club's apparently misguided policies this season. We can at least see now that the photo ban clearly wasn't designed to protect anyone's appearance from scrutiny. The untimely and unfortunate death of Markus, and the great debt we owe him for saving the club should not give anyone free rein to make decisions to the detriment of the fans, no matter how much justified sympathy this whole matter has evoked.