Manchester City forward, 24, told Reuters, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n“If you ask me what I want, my answer is that nobody wants to miss the birth of their first child. But I also \u200bknow that football \u200binvolves many \u2060other considerations. <\/p>\n
“I know the federation supports its players and understands their situations. We’ll see what we \u200bcan do.”<\/p>\n
However, Doku’s plan to leave the USA and return home has brought fierce criticism from L’Equipe channel presenter France Pierron, who labelled a father “completely useless” at the time of their child’s birth.<\/p>\n
“The World Cup is an incredible joy,” she said in a message posted to the Facebook page of French sports publication L’Equipe.<\/p>\n
“There are hundreds of footballers who would kill to be in your shoes. It might never happen again in your life.<\/p>\n
“You’re living out a childhood dream, yet you’re going to walk away from it all to attend the birth of your child – a disgusting moment, if you’ll pardon the expression, where the dad is completely useless.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Winger Jeremy Doku has been criticised for saying he wants to leave Belgium’s World Cup camp to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-649868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}