Three days before the state of emergency was declared in Spain on 14 March, the doctor at the second division B club Barakaldo gathered the players together and told them all to go home and not leave again. “This will be two weeks,” he said. “Then another two, then another two, then maybe more …”
Diego Cervero, the striker who had scored six goals in six games since joining Barakaldo in the winter, remembers the players looking at each other, wondering what he was going on about. “This is serious,” the doctor warned them.
“I listened to that, spoke to friends that are doctors, to my dad who was a doctor for 45 years, to my girlfriend, a pharmacist who already couldn’t leave Madrid, and thought: ‘Bloody hell, this is bad,’” Cervero says.
Sid Lowe
(@sidlowe)The doctor will quite literally see you now.
Que grande es. https://t.co/crN1hdSI7D
That afternoon he drove home to Oviedo, almost 300km west. En route, he decided he had to do something and over the weekend he called Barakaldo to ask permission. That Monday the club released a video, in which he offered to help the fight against coronavirus – from the front line.
It was no empty offer. Cervero has scored 243 goals in his career, including one from inside his own half a week before Barakaldo suspended training and sent their players home. He is also a qualified doctor. And he was absolutely serious. He started sending emails, filling in forms, making calls. Dozens of them: to the medical colleges in Asturias, the Basque Country and Madrid, to the ministry of health, to the emergency field hospital rapidly assembled in the capital. He spoke to Imanol, Barakaldo’s doctor. He asked friends and friends of friends. Every time they sent numbers or suggestions, he called. “Medicine is a vocation,” Cervero says. “I felt I had to help.”
When he was young, Cervero would accompany his dad, Rafael, a surgeon, when he was on call. There is a photo of them in an operating theatre . He received his medical degree in seven years while playing football, beginning at Real Oviedo in 2003, and made moves motivated as much by medicine as the game but for as long as he was a professional footballer legally he could not occupy another job. That meant he couldn’t do the MIR – médico interno residente – the equivalent of a house officer post where doctors specialise and complete their training. Although he earned a masters in sports nutrition and another in accidents and catastrophes, without the MIR he could not practice. That was the retirement plan.
The coronavirus crisis prompted the government to open the door to those with medical degrees. “You couldn’t work in the public health system before but that’s changed now: they needed people,” he says. “There was a decree that means you can, given how dramatic the situation is. I don’t have the knowledge of other doctors but I can do anything: man the phones, wheel beds around, take temperatures, change dressings, clean. I can’t demand anything: I don’t want a post and I will do it for free. And I’ll go anywhere.”
Like most people, he has been going nowhere: stuck at home, training indoors and alone twice a day. “The Madrid government wrote to say thank you but they don’t need anyone at the moment,” he says. “Asturias said there was no need, Soria too.” Mostly, there have been no replies, health authorities overwhelmed in a country where 20,000 people have died.
“I’ll go anywhere,” he repeats. Even England, say? “Yeah, absolutely, head first.” There’s a laugh. “But, then, you’ve heard my English. If I can help, I’ll go.”
For now,the striker turned doctor waits: sends more emails, writes more letters, makes more calls. He watched plans for some teams to make a return to training halted – a plan he describes as lamentable, and showing a “lack of morality”, asking why footballers should be allowed to go for a run around a field while kids are climbing the walls at home – and he has seen the Football Federation propose a kind of express play-off system to get the second division B and third-division finished. “It’s not easy,” he says. “You’re going to test 50 players every game? And what about the grandmother that needs that test more?”
On Wednesdays, the only day he leaves home, Cervero does the shopping, dropping food and medicine at his parents’ home on the way back. “My dad was the Spanish record-holder in the hammer throw in the 1950s. There was a chance of him going to the Olympics but his medical career got in the way. He’s 81 but he can lift 80 kilos still. It’s nuts,” he says.
“People call me ‘Doc’, but he’s the real Doc: a surgeon, my idol. He’s high-risk and he doesn’t leave home, no matter what. The place is disinfected; they’re following the rules exactly. They live on the fifth floor: I go there, leave the bags in the lift at the bottom, shout up to the them and say hello through the window.”