Real Madrid may ease Queiroz pain over lost generation

Carlos Queiroz has lived for the past decade with a gnawing feeling of what might have been if he had been given another shot at winning the World Cup with Portugal.

Taking charge at Europe's most successful club, Real Madrid, should ease the 50-year-old's pain at not fulfilling the promise of Portugal's "golden generation".

Queiroz signed a two-year deal on Wednesday to move from Manchester United to the Bernabeu where he links up again with Luis Figo, the most illustrious player of that generation.

Queiroz steered Portugal's under-20s to successive world titles in 1989 and 1991 in campaigns that spawned Figo, Rui Costa, Joao Pinto and Fernando Couto.

Two years after the second victory on home soil, his shot at the 1994 World Cup with Portugal's senior team foundered when they were eliminated at the qualifying stage and he resigned.

The players have since been dubbed the "lost generation" as the side failed to win European and world titles despite containing some of the game's great talents.

"It's difficult for me to cope with the ugly feeling I have deep in my soul that there was some unfinished business, that I missed an opportunity that will never, ever happen again," Mozambique-born Queiroz said last year.

"A lot of times since, it has depressed me to see what has happened to the national team and what I regret most is that they lost a legacy and a vision we created," he told the London Evening Standard.

Queiroz, who speaks five languages and has coached in five continents, has built a solid record with clubs in Portugal, the United States and Japan and the national teams of the United Arab Emirates and South Africa.

Helping steer Manchester United to the premier league crown at the end of his first season in English football as manager Alex Ferguson's number two was no mean achievement.

But Queiroz will be judged on what he achieves at nine-times European champions Real.

Queiroz's wide-ranging career and experience of different cultures should stand him in good stead in a Real Madrid dressing room bursting with football's biggest egos and talents.

But he has been accused of poor man management, which led to rifts with the Portuguese and South African national bodies.

His personality is perhaps better suited to the lower profile blackboard work and development of young players.

But Ferguson, a man who does not suffer fools gladly, is a great fan of Queiroz.

"He's been a real revelation and it's been an eye-opener in terms of some of his preparation. He's so professional, so determined, he has great initiative about him," Ferguson said last season.

A former goalkeeper in his native Mozambique who quit playing at 20 to be a trainer, Queiroz said the two incidents that most marked his youth were his brother dying in an accident, when he was 14, and an early marriage at 19.

A physical education teacher by profession, Queiroz said in a 1989 interview that he learned most from watching Sven-Goran Eriksson coach Benfica. Eriksson, now England manager, had two spells at Benfica in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Often referred to as "The Professor" in Portugal, Queiroz no doubt appeals to Real's sporting director Jorge Valdano as a man in his own intellectual image.

Queiroz and England captain David Beckham, sold to Real by United for 35 million euros ($40.27 million), will look to each other for support in a Bernabeu dressing room which had great respect for dismissed coach Vicente del Bosque.

"We are all human beings and have emotions, but it is about intelligence in the game. The best players must play the best football and be under the best emotional control," he told reporters last season.

"We must be more focused on the technical issues and not be involved in the emotional environment."

He was talking about United who, like Real, have some of the world's top players fighting for 11 places in the team.

"We need stars on the pitch," he said. "Stars in the sky do not win games."