"Excuse me mate - what's the score?"

Picture the scene…..your team are 3-2 up with a couple of mins to go. Your star centre forward picks up the ball out wide, drives at their last defender and goes past him before crashing a shot across the goalkeeper. The ball looks headed for the back of the net but the keeper does brilliantly to get a hand to the shot and palm it down. A pair of opposing players follow the rebound in and as both defender and attacker stretch desperately for the ball, it’s the attacker who just gets a toe on it and the ball dribbles agonisingly over the line for the opponents. Their players and fans let out a cry of angst in unison.

And what do you do? Play it cool and keep a lid on things? Nah…..a fist pump to accompany that cry of “get in!”, and a quick man hug with your fellow coaching staff.

But then, just as you turn back to the players on the pitch, you catch a glimpse of something you can’t ignore out of the corner of your eye. The defender who failed to clear the ball is close to tears, the emotion of the moment about to get the better of him.

Which is understandable…..9 year olds are allowed to cry.

Yes – it’s easy to act responsible when two junior teams are not so evenly matched. Rest the stronger players, rotate playing positions, set a little target for some keep ball to ensure you don’t run up a cricket score.

How very development focussed of you.

But retaining that focus is not quite so easy when you are playing your local rivals in a top of the table clash and your team want to be the ones who go into school on Monday morning with a smile on their face.

My Twitter timeline is full of British coaches bemoaning their more competitive counterparts, often with some cause for concern or even contempt.  I get it….we’ve all seen the veins popping out of some coaches’ necks as they scream at their defenders to get rid of the ball. Not pretty and not hugely beneficial.

Nothing worse than coaches screaming from the sideline !!

Personally though, I only find that marginally worse than a coach who spends half his life criticising others while his U13 team pass the ball around the park like robots without any sign that the players know what to do in either penalty area or in their 1v1 duals. A bit extreme perhaps but you get my point – you can have all of the text books and animated session plans you like but if your players don’t progress their ability to deal with competition on the pitch in whatever form it presents itself, you are not helping them.

But we’ll never be able to compete with the technical quality in countries like Spain if we just focus on competition right?

Let me tell you about some of the things I’ve seen in 18 months of Spanish football;

•          U7 teams wearing commemorative t-shirts to recognise their promotion to the next level of organised football
•         U9 teams where every single player in the team knows he/she has to stand over the ball when a free kick is given to the opponents to slow the game down and stop the oppnents taking it quickly
•         An 11 year old defender literally rugby tackle an opponent (great technique, waist high and then speared into the coaching staff on the sideline) to prevent the opponents counter attacking when the defender’s team were 4-0 up….for which applause broke out throughout the terraces where parents were watching and even from the player’s coaching staff
•          An U11 team that kicks off by shooting for goal from the half way line because they have a big kid who can strike a ball brilliantly for one so young
•         A group of parents celebrating a victory in the faces of the opposing team’s supporters like they’d won the World Cup…in a league game where the players are all 5 or 6

Not exaggerating – this is the reality of grass roots/junior football in Spain. Of course not every team is as extreme as some of those examples but every team wants to win..badly. Game management and gamesmanship starts early here.

It might not be so great for the kids but then again, I suspect some of the teams I refer to above will produce some very good players who go on to play a high standard of football here.

As for me…I love it. Our young players have to learn to deal with lots of different styles, different tactics and different challenges. As a team of U10s playing in Alevin football (U10 and U11), they are adapting well. We have principles we stick to in possession but when we recently played opponents who kick long from the keeper’s hands and simply fight for scraps off those long balls on a small pitch, our lads looked like rabbits in the headlights. They were out fought and out played, losing any composure or confidence they usually demonstrate because they simply didn’t expect such a tough physical game. Losing 7-2 having been unbeaten all season was a shock to the system, as was the partisan atmosphere in a very tight ground under the floodlights…at least for Graham Jr!

Crowds (and parents in particular) get heavily involved too often....even requiring Guardia presence!

But I enjoyed it more than the games we’ve won comfortably. It won’t be the only game like that this year but next year, when this group are second years in this age group, they will have benefitted massively from this process and this experience.

It’s not just about taking part here…and that suits me fine. Some kids unfortunately are simply not good enough to play and I don’t have a problem with that.

I retain the view that how you coach and how you develop young players is more important than results…and if you get the process right the results will come. Even coaching U21s/U19s in the UK, results were far, far from the be all and end all for me, but I knew that the next step for those players was senior football and so they needed to be prepared for results focused football.

There are some excellent coaches here who I think get the balance right. And of course there are some who use a different approach. Rather than criticise them, I’m grateful that they challenge our group in different ways.

Spain as a football nation may need to think about the long term impact of what I describe here and I think it’s fair to say the UK is much more progressive in its approach – further down the road in terms of educating coaches on skill acquisition, talent development and the benefits of embracing a 4 corner model -  to developing young players.

But for the best players, getting over the line in big tournaments or winning European trophies might just be linked to a footballing education that from a very early age has always valued competition and winning.