Oxford United boss Pep Clotet answers your questions

What are your views on playing with three centre halves and wing backs formation? I have done that before. As a football coach you must know all the systems and you use them differently according to what players you have, or the culture of the league. At the same time, I think it’s very important, especially in pre-season, that you test everything. Coaching is about testing and testing and finding out what works and what doesn’t. That’s why you saw us play that system against Oxford City and you might see it again. It could well be that in the season we have two ways of playing, but at the minute I’m focused on settling on one.  You also take into consideration what the team has done in previous seasons.   Did you watch any League One football last season? Since we took over at Swansea we created a department because we had to be spot-on with the transfers, so it was analysing future talent. We analysed a lot of games in League One. I did see a lot of games last season, mainly because we had players at Leeds who were on loan in League One. So for example we had Lee Erwin at Oldham and we were always watching a few teams around Yorkshire in case we had to loan out players. Apart from the marathon I did on Oxford (as preparation for the job interview) the most recent game I saw was Fleetwood in the play-offs.   A couple of your early managerial jobs ended quite quickly. What did you learn from those experiences and was there ever a point where you thought about leaving football? You learn that in football you can do things very well and end up losing the game. The lessons come in defeat, my father taught me that. I have had a lot of success in other projects, but I felt I learned more when I have failed. The fact that I’ve failed made me better and understand more about how not to fail. Failure is a part of the game. Marcelo Bielsa said everyone works very hard and we all fail, but sometimes we succeed. It is normal in life that you work very hard and now and then you succeed at something. For you to succeed, someone else has to fail. I never thought about stopping and doing something else. On the contrary, I just thought ‘I need to get more prepared’. I analysed what happened and it made me refocus. The fact we are here talking is because of that. Oxford United boss Pep Clotet answers your questions