By Adonis Pratsides
August 28 – The lack of precision and the negligence, with which those who have attempted to defame Dr. Eva Carneiro have operated, would have stunned even the most listless surgeon, as the steady progress of Women in football suddenly flat lined.
After becoming the most successful England football team in half a century, the affectionately dubbed ‘Lionesses’ emerged from the Women’s World Cup, having brought the profile of their game to an entirely unprecedented level.
As a result of the success of not just the England women, but of the tournament itself, a legacy, which they had established in Canada, inspired a nation.
AFC Wimbledon quickly added three more ladies teams, while at Wembley, they launched the ‘We Can Play’ campaign, to shatter lingering pre-conceptions about women’s and girl’s football. And right across the country, as the Women’s Super League reconvened, clubs received noticeably bigger crowds at matches.
Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a moment, which proved to be as fleeting as a smile on the face of the self-professed ‘happy one’, Jose Mourinho. For little over a month later, the Chelsea First Team Doctor, Eva Carneiro, found herself demoted and publicly humiliated, all before being quite literally swept under the carpet, as if to remind women everywhere of their place in the sport.
Dr. Carneiro became the subject of media frenzy when, during Chelsea’s first game of the new Premier League season, she (along with Head Physio Jon Fearn) were condemned as “naïve” and “impulsive” by the Chelsea manager, for entering the field of play to treat a seemingly injured Eden Hazard in stoppage time (temporarily reducing their side to just nine players, as goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois had already been sent off.)
Although it has since emerged that referee Michael Oliver had waved the pair on to the pitch and that both Carneiro and Fearn had carried out their duty impeccably, both medics have since been indefinitely outcast from the inner circle of the match day dugout. And while both professionals accepted their punishment with the same decorum with which they acted on that fateful afternoon… The same courtesy was only extended to one of the two, by the external world.
In fact, you would have been forgiven for not knowing that Jon Fearn was involved at all as the battle lines between Jose and Eva, man and woman, were hastily drawn in the press.
As her male counterpart was allowed to retreat to the confines of the Cobham training ground to tend to his own his wounds in peace, Carneiro, was instead branded a “celebrity doctor”, a “cheerleader” and in a wholly unsubstantiated yet predictable kiss-and-tell story in the days that followed, as “sex mad” and, you guessed it, to have been having an affair with a member of the Chelsea playing squad.
This general lack of maturity and sensitivity should have come as no surprise to any of us, least of all Ms. Carneiro; who since being promoted to working with the first team in 2011, has been the victim of sexist chanting at away games and will be accustomed to seeing her appearance being lauded over her medical pedigree.
Speaking last year at a Swedish FA sports medicine conference, Dr. Carneiro said:
“Women want to be leaders, we just put them off as we go along.”
“In every programme I’ve watched in my life, the female doctor is either hyper-sexualized or she’s not present. This needs to change. Women are discouraged at a young age.
“As a male you can aspire to having a successful professional life and a fulfilling personal life. Women are told that if they want to have both, at best it’s going to be difficult and at worse it’s going to be a disaster.”
“Ninety percent of the mail I receive is from young women wanting to perform the same role. We need to tell them its possible and that their presence will improve results.”
Of course, there are those who adhere to the belief that Carneiro was reprimanded rather as a result of a Facebook post, in which she thanked her fans for their ongoing support in the wake of the incident.
Presumably, she was referring to those same young women who may aspire to walk down the path she has paved for them, but who are now also privy to the true colours of a man’s world, which fails time and time again to prove it is as progressive and boundless as it claims to be.
To the young women who may have been dreaming of a career in the game, perhaps solely thanks to Carneiro’s efforts to redefine the image of the quintessential female doctor, saw her portrayed as the very thing she long feared she might be; as over-sexualized and incompetent.
The ‘We can play’ initiative is right to claim that, despite football’s status as the largest team sport for girls and women in the country, this kind of gender stereotyping and even the derogatory results of Internet searches, all contribute to a perpetuation of a negatively distorted image on the women’s game.
And so, despite the gaping hole in gender equality within the sport, which the England women’s team, Eva Carneiro and various other women have worked tirelessly for years in order to close. The damage caused to their legacy in recent weeks might be too great for even a brilliant doctor, such as Carneiro, to arrest.
Adonis Pratsides is an Assistant Producer for talkSPORT radio and the host of In off the POST for Shoreditch Radio. Follow him on twitter: @Adonis131 | @iotpSHOW