BY TIM PARSONS
Chelsea doctor, Dr. Cameiro, has been demoted in a move by Mourinho that has angered fans and some observers of the sport. The 41 year old Gilbratta born doctor who studied medicine at Nottingham University before completing her Masters at the prestigious Queen Mary University in London, has long been the eye catch of paying fans on the pitch, as well as the male dominated viewing public world wide, whenever she lends her expert service to footballers in need of medical attention. But in a decisive move, the Chelsea manager has decided that she will retain her title as first team doctor but will no longer sit on the bench during matches, attend training games, or report to the teams hotel ahead of fixtures.
The reason for these disciplinary measures can be traced to Saturday’s match against Chelsea in which the doctor rushed on to treat Eden Hazard when Chelsea were already down to 10 men at Stamford Bridge. He claimed that if the player had been able to recover on his own, he would have continued playing instead of being taken to the touchline to wait for the referees signal to rejoin the game. Making reference to the touchline incident in post interviews, Mourinho complained “I wasn’t happy with my medical staff because, even if you are a medical doctor or secretary on the bench, you have to understand the game,” he said.
Chelsea’s physio Jon Fearn was actually first on to the pitch and he is also understood to have had his duties reassigned away from match-day tasks as part of the shake up. Both Eden and Cameiro are expected to be absent from the dugout area for the game against Manchester City on Sunday. She was later sent many comforting messages on social media which expectedly drew her appreciation which she dutifully expressed to her many supporters.
“I would like to thank the general public for their overwhelming support,” she later wrote on social media. “Really very much appreciated.”
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ERRONEOUS DECISION
Mourinho’s conviction that the doctor was failing in discretion would have been a question of value judgment had she taken the decision to go on the pitch hereself to treat injured Eden, and he would certainly still have failed in his own discretion to publicly criticize her the way he did. However, he made an embarrassing mistake. Referee Oliver had actually beckoned the doctor on the pitch , and under the General Medical Council of good practice guidelines, she would have been in breach of duty had she disobeyed the referee. Mourinho is incontrovertibly in error here, and really owes her an apology. He appears to have a vendetta against her, and some of the agitation expressed against his behavior are most valid. Dr. Cameiro has constantly been subjected to sexual remarks from unscrupulous fans who show no restraint in shouting out lewd requests to her on the pitch. Such obscene comments don’t stop there, as many male perverts pass dirty comments on social media. It is another expression of the scum of society, when individuals forget that she, like any other woman, is entitled to have a personal dignity respected.
Yet, with Morinho’s unjustified attack on a woman paid to do a job within her field of expertise, he perpetuates the wide misconception that women
can sometimes be treated as second class citizens who are subordinate to their male counterparts. His comment ” even if you are a medical doctor, you have to understand the game”, has already got feminists and female sports reporters firing bullets at him for suggesting she does not understand the game because she is a woman. Well, that seems to be the implicit deduction from that comment, and such interpretation is well founded. This is unacceptable, and there should be no compromise in this being communicated to a man whose club was not so long ago tarnished by reprehensible racist taunts and behavior against a professional black man in France. Already, there have been calls by fans of rival clubs, for the established doctor to be transferred over, though it would seem Mourinho would rather have her under his control than in control of her own career. At best, his public criticism of the well educated doctor seems like an egoistic move by a man trying to use his power to impose some unwarranted level of dominance on an very educated woman who perhaps threatens his masculinity and confidence.
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Even if Mourinjo is correct in his judgment that the doctor was too hasty in the decision to go unto the pitch, he could have privately scolded her rather than publicly attempt to humiliate her. It would be very difficult to think up a legitimate excuse for him to demote her openly, except to stamp his authority and feed his ego. He could have even demoted her without making it public, or insisted on her waiting for instructions in future before going on the pitch. Even such hypothetical approach would have been open to criticism but would have been much better than the decision he took. So far, Mourinho looks the manager with bad judgment who is picking on the woman doctor who was simply doing her job in fulfiling her professional obligations.
