While Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho's decision to ban club doctor Eva Carneiro from future matches and training sessions was purportedly due to his immediate anger over Carniero and Jon Fearn rushing onto the field to attend to star Eden Hazard in the waning moments of Chelsea's Premier League match against Swansea City, leaving the already vulnerable club suddenly even more susceptible, a recent report from Duncan Castles of OneWorldSports.com suggests that Carneiro's gender may actually have had more to do with the demotion.
Per Castles, sources close to Mourinho indicated that his issues with Carniero go back almost a year and center greatly on the fact that she is a woman.
"Mourinho is said to have held reservations about Carneiro's role within the first-team squad since at least last year," writes Castles. "While there is no question about her professional abilities, the Portuguese coach was concerned that the dressing room dynamic was affected by the presence of a female. According to a source, some players had expressed misgivings to the coaching staff about the set-up, arguing that it forced them to alter their usual behavior in a team environment. Famous for his attention to detail, Mourinho has always sought to eliminate factors that might reduce his team's likelihood to win matches."
Carneiro has become possibly the most well-known female medic in the Premier League. After Chelsea's bout with Swansea, Mourinho declared that the woman who was the successor to Bryan English would no longer attend matches - after Chelsea's upcoming tilt with Manchester United - or training sessions.
"I wasn't very happy with my medical staff because you have to understand the game," said Mourinho, via The Daily Mail. "They were impulsive and naive. Whether you are a kit man, doctor or secretary on the bench you have to understand the game.
"You have to know you have one player less and when you go to the pitch to assist a player, you must be sure that the player has a serious problem. And I was sure that Eden hadn't a serious problem. He had a knock, he was very, very tired. And my medical department - on an impulse, naive - they left me with eight outfield players; and in a counter-attack, after a set piece, we were with two players less."
Fortunately for Carneiro, there has been an outpouring of support from Chelsea fans. Carneiro even took to social media to "thank the general public for the overwhelming support," stating that it was "very much appreciated."
Carneiro has, in the past, spoken out for gender equality.
"In every (medical) television program I have ever watched in my life, the female doctor is hyper-sexualized. She goes off with Tom Cruise and it is all happy endings. Or she is not present. Or she is a lesbian," she said during a conference in Sweden last year, via the Mail.
"This is the perception young girls grow up with of what a female doctor is. This needs to change. There need to be ass-kicking women who are not behaving like men, who do a really good job and save the day. That is not going off with Tom Cruise!
"I think women are discouraged from a young age."
