Was playing some more Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 today and I was just reminded of an age old gaming adage, save your game.

I was in the second Transfer Window of the current season in Master League. The Sports Director was saying that I should renew some of the contracts of my players to avoid excessive salary demands in the future. Makes sense. So I went ahead and tried renewing their contracts. For some reason, renewing the contracts for some players did not give the option of extending the number of years in their contracts. I thought it was odd, but went ahead with it anyway. I guess I sort of just expected the contract years to automatically extend. Nope, didn't happen. So now I ended up increasing my player's salaries while their contracts would still expire in the same amount of time as before. What a waste of the team's salary budget!

I have a five game winning streak now, playing Pro Evolution Soccer’s Master League mode. I’m now up to 9th in the standings, where previously my team was always around 16th to 18th in the standings. It seems like the team is coming together now. I’m also starting to feel comfortable with the game.

I used to play the game in a rush. I was rushing to get the ball to the other side, rushing to pass, rushing to shoot, rushing to clear the ball off the opposing player. All that made my team vulnerable to counter attacks from the opposing team. So after a streak of games where the best I could manage was a draw, I took a step back to evaluate what I was doing wrong. Sort of like investigating an application that is performing poorly, as far as programming goes.