Eva Carneiro has case against Chelsea - but sexual discrimination?
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ByEurosport
Published 09/09/2015 at 13:32 GMT
Liam Happe feels Eva Carneiro is 100% in the right to take on Chelsea over her demotion - but hopes reports she will allege sexual discrimination aren't true.
Chelsea physio Eva Carneiro (PA Sport)
Image credit: Eurosport
It is being reported that Eva Carneiro is planning legal action against her employers, Chelsea, over the fact that she and colleague Jon Fearn were kicked off first-team duty due to the events in the closing stages of their 2-2 opening weekend draw with Swansea.
For those of you who’ve given the whole ordeal a miss, the defending Premier League champions were minutes away from a frustrating draw with the Swans in early August and had been reduced to 10 men thanks to a red card for goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois when Eden Hazard required medical attention.
When Carneiro and Fearn answered the referee’s call to treat the Belgian playmaker, it meant he had to leave the field of play for treatment – leaving Jose’s side down to nine men temporarily. Mourinho criticised the duo in his post-match press conference and then decided to replace them on matchdays, though they both remain employed by the club.
It's easy to see why the majority of the football community feels Mourinho is in the wrong, and that Carneiro may well have a case to bring forward.
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José Mourinho und Chelsea-Ärztin Eva Carneiro
Image credit: Imago
In the weeks since the game, Jose has employed other creative reasons for why his side have constantly failed to win matches in what has been a rough start to their title defence. This only makes his treatment of Carneiro and Fearn seem more like over-the-top scapegoating.
However, the issue has been put at risk of descending into farce by Mary O’Rourke QC as she commented on the situation and the potential upcoming legal wrangle at the Soccerex Convention in Manchester.
On the one hand, she made a compelling argument for why Carneiro has a strong case:
The medical team did nothing wrong because their duty was to the player as their patient. Their job in the club is to look after the players, not to run the team and be tactically aware.
Particularly in these modern times, where the health and safety of professional athletes is under huge scrutiny thanks to the post-career issues of NFL players, MMA fighters, wrestlers and more, her argument is 100% correct. Had Mourinho done his job as well as his medical staff did theirs on the day, maybe the nine men of Chelsea would have had a two-goal lead to defend for those few minutes.
Unfortunately, O’Rourke continued her argument with the insinuation that sexual discrimination would play a key role in Carneiro’s case.
This stems from the excerpt of Mourinho’s post-match press conference when he said the following:
Even if you are a kit man, a doctor or a secretary on the bench, you have to understand the game. I was sure he hadn’t a serious problem. He was very tired but my medical department, on an impulse, was naïve and left me with eight outfield players on a counter-attack.
O’Rourke zoned in on the use of the word ‘secretary’ and criticised Mourinho, who up until that point was clearly in the wrong:
Ninety-five per cent of secretaries are women. Everyone listening to that would have taken it as a comment that women don’t know anything about football. If you put that statement out to 100 people, 99 of them would interpret it the same way.
On the contrary, people who aren't QCs probably interpreted Mourinho differently: he expects everyone employed by the club to be involved in their quest for success, not just the players and coaching staff whose actual occupation is based on the competition of professional football.
If you need further validation of where Mourinho’s mind was when he made this statement, check out the Chelsea media team’s extremely biased match report from the following weekend, when they were comprehensively beaten by title rivals Man City.
Jose’s quote also mentions the position of ‘kit man’ – does that single-handedly imply that he expects Fearn to lay out the players’ shirts and clean their shoes? Does it mean men know nothing about football? Of course it doesn’t.
Yes, a majority of people would indeed still associate the position of secretary with a woman - though perhaps not at Chelsea, where the job of Club Secretary is held by a man named David Barnard.
But it is not Mourinho's job to correct society's misconceptions - you might instead look to the Premier League clubs who do not employ women doctors.
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Eva Carneiro (Chelsea's doctor)
Image credit: Imago
Both Carneiro and O’Rourke are living examples of the very gradual progress society is making from the times when women really were expected to leave important professions ‘to the fellas’.
They prove this by excelling in their respective fields and going about their duties without any unnecessary highlighting of the fact they are women. Claims of sexual discrimination against Mourinho on the basis of a single ambiguous word in this instance could be seen as a step backwards.
Carneiro and Fearn appear to have a strong case without anyone over-analysing Mourinho's words. They have the sympathy of almost everyone who has read about the incident. Why should either of them risk that by trying to make this into something it probably isn't?
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