Queiroz has a problem on his hands

By Mike Wills

Carlos Queiroz is the new coach of Real Madrid. Poor bastard.

That's not a job I'd wish on anyone, not even grumpy "Sir" Alex, the first Earl of Spittle and Whinge.

Real Madrid is the biggest football club in the world. Why stop there?

Real Madrid is the most famous sporting club of any kind on the planet.

All well and good and very attractive for an ambitious soccer coach but unfortunately for Carlos, above and beyond everything, Real is a massive circus - bigger than Boswell-Wilkie and Cirque du Soleil rolled into one.

It would be more appropriate if the team were called Unreal or Surreal Madrid because what goes on there has no connection with fiscal or even footballing reality and the club treats its coaches in a way that will make Carlos pine for the sanity, coherence, dignity and good sense of his former bosses at Safa.

Thinking of which, I can't quite make up my mind as to whether we should be praising Safa for its perspicacity in employing the then largely unknown Queiroz as Bafana Bafana coach or damning it for sacking him before any of us ever really worked out how to pronounce his name.

Much as it goes against the grain, I am tending towards cheering the local soccer mafia as I, for one, scoffed when his appointment was announced with much hype as to his abilities.

Their initial judgment has clearly been vindicated, however, and we may judge the subsequent mismanagement of the man.

At Madrid, Queiroz will learn that he is not a Manager or even a Coach in the conventional sense of the professional soccer world. He will not determine which players the club buys nor, in many instances, who starts.

That role rests with the just about everyone in the Spanish capital except Queiroz - public opinion, club and national politics and the overwhelming need to outdo Barcelona will dictate everything.

He surely can't improve the skills of the world's finest players and he has no choice on the team's strategic approach because Real's almost oppressive traditions and their manic, scarf-waving fans in the Bernabeu Stadium demand all-out attack.

And even if you win things or even everything, as Queiroz's predecessor Vincente del Bosque did, you still get axed on the whim of a player's agent or the club president's hairdresser.

All of those issues and Beckham too.

It's an impossible task. Which explains why this most proud of sporting institutions is prepared to suffer the apparent indignity of appointing the Assistant Manager of one of their greatest commercial rivals.

Surely mighty Real should be after Ferguson rather than his relatively anonymous sidekick?

The reality of Real is that the coach is not in any sense "the boss" or "the gaffer" of English soccer mythology and he is entirely dispensable.

And when, inevitably, Carlos is chewed up and spat out he then can return to our shores as a man finally just-about-qualified to tackle the even more insane soccer task of coaching Kaizer Chiefs.