Jacqui Oatley: Changing career to follow your passion

Where did your love of football begin?

So, I’m a little bit odd, in many ways, but particularly in this regard, because it wasn’t the traditional Dad taking you to football, and being mad one club, or brother kicking balls round in the garden, and then you got into that way. 

I went to an all-girls school for 10 years, and in those day’s girls didn’t really like football, nobody I knew did, and so nobody at school ever talked about football, mum and dad didn’t, my brother, no interest in football whatsoever. 

I was always obsessed with sport right from the word go, my dad liked golf, snooker, and I use to watch everything on TV, all sorts of sports, Wimbledon wall to wall coverage, and Olympics. I would watch everything, so that was an innate passion, but I had no introduction to football at all, until in was lying on the sofa one day, I think maybe I was ill, and didn’t want to get up and change the TV channel, and just watched this game, and that was it. 

I can’t even tell you what game it was. There weren’t many games on TV back then, it was one a week, I think. Some switch flicked in my head, and I just thought this is the sport for me, I can still remember, I can picture the scene in my lounge when I just thought this is the sport for me, and it was just absolutely right for me, and that was it I suddenly over night became the biggest weirdo and nobody understood why, or where it had come from, and my good friends at school, assumed it was because I was trying to get in with the boys, not that we had any at our schools, but they thought that must be it, but it wasn’t. 

I just went and ripped all my Bros posters down off my bedroom wall, and my dressing table glass and replaced them with nobody in particular at first, I just cut any pictures out from match, shoot, and 90-minutes magazine, and just filled my bedroom with footballers, and to this day I don’t really understand it, it just happened. 

How old were you then at that point do you think? 

Good question, I’m still not entirely sure, I think I was probably about 13/14, and from that day onwards I would run to the front door when the dog would bark, when The Express and Star newspaper would arrive, and previously I’d open to page three, the TV guide and circle what I wanted to watch that night, and one day I just went straight to the back page, and well I’ve got a local football team, I’ll start supporting them, and that was it, it really was. 

So, when your friends were looking at heat magazine or smash hits or whatever it was then, you were looking at football magazines? 

Yeah, that was it, they were all reading girly magazines, I use to have the Jacqui annual going back a bit. Shoot, or Match, one of them was out on a Tuesday and Wednesday, and I knew the publication date, and I’d walk sort of 15 minutes into the Stars New Shops in Codsall and would buy those magazines on whatever date they come out, and I wouldn’t just flick threw them like you might do a girly magazine, I would read through every single word and absorb it. 

To the back of Match and Shoot they would have all the starting 11’s, and substitutes, and who had come on, and who had gone off, of every team throughout the league, and I use to scour. I don’t know why; it sounds really odd. I use to scour all down the lower leagues, and absorb what was happening in, it was the third and fourth division, at that time, league one and two now, and I would pick out a player if there was a feature on them, I was thinking oh god maybe Walsh will sign them one day, and maybe I should write and to the club and tell them or something, Mark Rankine of Doncaster looks good, and then they signed him, I didn’t write to the club, it was a coincidence. 

Do you remember going to your first live match? How did that feel, did that live up to the expectations you had in terms of all you had read and studied about? 

Well it is funny because I went to the old Molineux Stadium, which only had two sides open, and one of the stands that was open was miles away from the pitch because the club had run out of money before they could finish the stadium redevelopment, and two stands were condemned. So, it was a weird sort of none atmosphere, but I use to stand on the south bank, got a season ticket for £75 and use to go up where all the action was, and there weren’t really any girls or women around there, and I use to get asked how come you’re not down the front with the girls, and I just couldn’t think of anything worse than being away from the atmosphere. 

That was what it was about, I was just absorbed by the passion, the atmosphere, the tactics, or lack of them, everything to do with the game, the sights, the smells, the sounds, the travelling away from home when you feel part of a gang, you feel part of a tribe because football is so tribal, and I was just completely absorbed by it and utterly obsessed, and I still am to this day. 

Did you play football at all as a girl?

We couldn’t play at school, I went to an all-girls school and we weren’t allowed to play when I asked, I went to a virtually all boys school for sixth form, and we weren’t allowed to play there either. So, I set up a lower sixth against upper sixth girls football team, the boys payed a pound to charity to watch, us and come and laugh at us because none of us had ever kicked a ball before, and no I just brought myself a ball, and just taught myself how to do keepie-uppies endlessly for hours in the garden and would bash the ball against the garage door and annoy the rest of the family. 

So, I taught myself that but there were no clubs, there were no teams, and nobody I knew was remotely interested, so it was only when I went to university at the age of 17, I went to Leeds Uni, and the very first day at freshers week I made a beeline for the women’s football table, and I said I’ve never played in my life, can I join, and they said yeah, sure. I had a great time, socially it was absolutely phenomenal traveling all over the country, all over Yorkshire, and go on so well with the girls, and that is what I would have loved to of done from the age of 5, not 17. 

Then I carried on playing, moved down the London, joined a local team in The Greater London League, unfortunately had a very, very serious injury, dislocated my knee cap, ruptured all the ligaments, lost all the cartilage under the knee cap, and was told it was such a bad injury that I could never kick a ball again really, so I haven’t, and that is when I ended up changing career as a result of that. 

Not a straight route into media and journalism, was that a piece that made you change your career direction, your injury? 

I had always thought about it, growing up there was no inspiration in terms of working in football media or sports media. Yes, there was the odd female presenter, and Helen Rollason of course, but it never felt like something I could aspire to do personally, whether that was a confidence issue or what, I just didn’t see openings, I didn’t see women going into journalism, I never really thought about a career in it. 

So, what was the thing that made you shift?

The short version is, I did a German degree, travelled around the world for a year after that, came back at the age of 22, and thought oh I thought I would know what I wanted to do by now, and I didn’t, and so I did some temping the Black Country in Dudley, and I just had thought until then that I could make a career of sports journalism, because despite having this obsession growing up, and at school where they are all thought I was a bit odd, probably I’m guessing, nobody suggested, oh have you thought about broadcasting or writing, because in those days you didn’t really see female sport writers. 

So, it was only after a few years in another job that I started to get itchy feet, and I knew that wasn’t for me that job, the career just wasn’t fulfilling, so really I thought god I’d love to start again, how do I do it. So I read biographies of people who had got into this business, and a lot of them had journalism qualifications, or work experience, or degrees in that field, and I didn’t have any of that, but I brought a book about how to become a journalist, and it started of by saying it is very handy if you have a language degree, and I though huh, okay, maybe I can do this. 

Then I decided to take a couple of days of work, and do a couple of days work experience at Haters sport agency, I went to a couple of press conferences, and I was like oh my goodness this is for me, and put my hand up, and asked Glenn Hoddle a question and the answer made it into the Daily Mail, the next day, and I thought oh this is a buzz, I’d like to ask football people questions, this is great. 

So, I gave up my job one day because I thought well I can’t get the work experience I need, whilst being in another job, and then of course I wouldn’t have an income living in London, so I handed in the notice on my flat, and I rang around a few friends, and said look this is the decision I had decided to make, I really want to make a go of changing career, but I need to find a way in somehow, can I come and stay on your floor for a week, or stay on your sofa bed. So I just took a duvet, and a carrier bag with pillow, and a little back around London to whoever was kind enough to let me stay on their floor because everyone was paying rent at that time you see, and I just did as much work experience, unpaid, as I could and by that point I had done 6 months of hospital radio, at the end of my working day, and then I would do an evening of print journalism course, and a radio production course. 

So, I was doing all this work experience as much as I could, and finding out as much as I could about the industry in my spare time, but eventually I had to give up everything to throw everything at it, and so that is what I did, and I thought where do I go from here, I’m doing all this unpaid work experience, but I need to get a job, and you can’t really just get a job without any kind of qualification unless you are extremely lucky.

So, I did that for a year in Sheffield, I moved up there. 

Was the post grad in journalism or sports journalism, or…? 

In broadcast journalism, so it was half TV, half radio but I had zero interest in TV, and whilst I was there just wrote to all the local BBC stations, and in the area, and BBC Leeds TV invited me in for 2 days work experience, and whilst I was there, I went on Leeds united financial story, and helped the guy that was doing it because he wasn’t into football and they had a lot of financial issues at the time, and collard the sports editor in the newsroom and he said well would you be interested in coming to do a voice test because we don’t have anyone to do none league, and I was like yeah to right!

Cut a long story short I did the non-league football reporting, £21 a week, and I didn’t give a monkeys about money. Not that I had loads, but I had saved up all my bonuses from my previous job, and so yeah, I just turned the West Yorkshire on-league football scene into my first patch, and I absolutely adored it. 

I was still studying at the time and I was so grateful for the opportunity, every night and evening and none working day, was dedicated towards building contacts and getting stories, and I use to write non-league football stories for the guy who was doing Radio Leeds in the mornings, because I thought you’re adding value to the station by giving them non-league news, and they weren’t doing that before, so one thing led to another and I was asked if I wanted to do shifts on BBC London, after I had gone down there one day and spoken to the sports editor, and one thing led to another and I ended up moving back down south, 5-live invited me in, they got me to do the weekend breakfast sport, and things carried on from there, and I had started doing commentary for BBC Leeds which was extremely grateful for and carried that on at 5-live, and womens Euros 2005 was my first break on that front with them. 

Where there many women working in that BBC sports team at the time when your arrived there?

So when I started at BBC Leeds, there was Tanya Arnold, who has been around for a very long time, very, very experience so she was more on the TV side, she did a lot of the Leeds United, Rugby league stories, cricket, oh my goodness it is an amazing patch, it really is, it was a great start for me. 

Then when I moved down to BBC London, Pete Stevens, the sports editor was brilliant at giving women an opportunity, he still is to this day, I often phone him up or see him and suggest somebody too him, or ask him if he has got anybody for somebody else, because he is just great at giving people opportunities. 

But, of course it was extremely male dominated, certainly local radio and I think it still is really, I’m not too sure why, I don’t see too many women in the local radio press box, or even local newspapers, so nationally broadcast wise there are a lot more women now on TV and on the Radio which is absolutely brilliant, but I do worry a little bit about the supply line, because really that is where you need to get your experience, where there is less pressure in a regional print media and broadcast environment and you can learn from people, and kick on.

When you started out at the BBC did people talk about that there weren’t enough women, was that something that people were making a conscious effort to change that at the time?

Not initially, I was conscious that in local radio there weren’t a lot of women, certainly not doing commentary there was one at the time, who is no longer doing it unfortunately, but in those days you would get into local radio you would do sports bulletins for local stations, I was lucky on that patch, because you would be sitting in a box all day doing radio Leeds, York, Sheffield and Humberside sports bulletins and be writing quickly and on air, it was a quick turn-around so I learnt very quickly. 

But, you would tend to do that, and then you would do non-league or local football reporting, and there tended to be a bit of glad ceiling that women didn’t tend to do commentary in those days, but I said to my sports editor at the time, Derm Tanner, that I was keen to do it and asked for advice, and one day a game was cancelled off that radio Leeds were going to do, and they knew that I was keen to do commentary, so the reporting match I was doing to do Wakefield and Emley against Worksop Town, suddenly became the commentary game. I was like oh my goodness, I had got up at three in the morning to do the breakfast show that day, and I had to try and do some prep for the commentary, and it was quite funny because in those days we didn’t really have very much information on the internet, especially on non-league football, there really wasn’t much, but  I did my best, it must have been absolutely terrible, honestly the player identification was so hard, but they were all sixth foot, with short dark hair, and miles away, you couldn’t even see their numbers, you’re in the corner low down in the commentary box, but hey I got through it. 

I thought event though there weren’t many women around at that time, personally I didn’t see it as a barrier because I think maybe having a bit of life experience helped me with that. I had been a manager in a previous industry  in intellectual property I had managed staff, so I had that bit of maturity, and a bit of self confidence as a human really, I was quite good with people, and my football knowledge I was very confident with because I was that weirdo obsessive type so I didn’t worry about that. 

I just thought, you know what I wasn’t aiming high, I was really aiming to work for 5-live one day, that was the only ambition, and I did have it in my head that I would like to do it before I was 30, just be on air once for 5-live before I was 30, and I managed it at the age of 29 I think. 

That was really it because I use to listen to 5-live all day, all evening, in the car, at home in my flat, and their football coverage I just thought was outstanding and I idolised the people that were on their, they were my kind of pop stars really in those day, because they were the people I looked up to, so to work with them was just an absolute privilege.

Did you have any issues in terms of being a woman in a press box, people not being happy to answer your questions, any players or managers, or do you think your vase knowledge kind of put you in a stronger position that some?

Well it is funny because going back to the non-league days my very first reporting match was Bradford Park Avenue against Ashton United in the Unibond Premier League, and  I think it was the most terrifying experience of my life because they played at the Horsfall Stadium which had one of those awful running tracks around the outside, and they had one of those horrible enclosed press boxes which if you’re doing print journalism maybe that is a okay because you’re a bit warmer, but for broadcast it was shocking, because I just remember these guys, I don’t think anybody was under the age of 60 there, and I think they has been going for a very long time, and they looked at this blonde thing with a massive mobile phone, thinking what is she doing, what would she know, and of course it all feel completely silent when they threw to me, and I was so self-conscious, it was horrible feeling, and I remember interviewing players at Frickley Athletic and you know standing by the dressing rooms, and asking them for team news, and they looked at me like I was a bit mad, like why do you care about the team news, and why do you care about formations, maybe journalists didn’t take much notice, but certainly not female ones, but I was really bang into it, I wanted to know the formation, and how they were going to play. 

I built my patch, and I worked my way up, and I wasn’t self-conscious in that regard, because I felt I knew what I was talking about, I didn’t have issues, oh gosh someone is going to find me out, that really wasn’t a problem, just because I knew how hard I’d worked and how much research I did, so that was always fine. 

But, yeah I have only had a few instances with managers where I have thought you think I have no idea what I’m talking about don’t you because I’m a lass, not too many really, in all these years, but there was one manger I remember who when I interviewed him after a premier league game actually, but I could tell he was a bit of a dinosaur, even though he wasn’t that old, and he was just looking throw me and I was asking perfectly fair questions, and I knew he just thought what the points. Then, I remember I’m just going to remark on a couple of his tactical changes and he looked at me suddenly in the eye, and he went you know your football don’t you, and I just thought oh dear, oh dear, this is pathetic, really it was quite pathetic. 

But, that was obviously his pre-conception and I guess we all grow up with pre-conceptions, and I have certainly walked into Dixons and Maplin’s before and realised that I have subconsciously gone for the male shop steward, rather than the lady because I was asking a technical question.  I remember having a word with myself afterwards, thinking what are you doing, you have had this for years in football, but then when you think about it, it is kind of natural for a lot of people to do that, and of course we still have that little bit today in terms of ‘oh what would she know’, but I think people do realise there are plenty of us now that have grown up madly passionate about our sport, and having lived it and breathed it and I think it is a lot more excepted now. 

Along the likes of Gabby Logan, and Sue Barker, and Ellie Oldroyd, I hear lots of talk about, and Claire Balding too, you are recognised for almost  breaking that glass ceiling for womens sport presenters, so do you feel that opportunities for women now coming in often are very different from where it was 15 years ago? 

Very much so, absolutely, and it is thanks to all those wonderful women who you mentioned then, who have broken down those barriers, they probably wouldn’t say they have, or meant to, but they just got on with doing their job and doing it fantastically well, which naturally then means when the next person comes in there isn’t so much of a mixed trust. 

Which certainly I experience with commentary was the biggest barrier was the mistrust, of what on earth would she know, I bet she doesn’t know our team, I bet she couldn’t have that passion. I have actually heard these things which are hilarious, but yeah, I think it is so different now. 

It is so different to the int that people are actively looking for good women to recruit, that is the difference because there is the this drive now for diversity, and a lot of people think of the ‘D word’ as being a pejorative term, but actually I think of it as being more representative of the audience.

I remember a friend of mine who is not a sports fan at all, has said that one of the things she has noticed with sort of seeing me presenting is sort that she thinks having a female presenter actually doesn’t exclude her from the show, and from the subject matter, which I hadn’t really thought of before. She felt as if, oh actually this show is for me, if she is talking about it, maybe it is not just an old boys’ clubs that she has previously seen sport as being. 

I think all white male panels these days are not really the done thing, and on occasions it is fine, if it is a very small panel about a certain subject, but bosses now are realising it is not good enough. You don’t just get any old women, any old black person, any old Asian person, no way that is when you have got problems.

If you cant be bothered to find the best people, that is when you have got problems, because then is breeds resentment amongst peers and amongst the audience and really it does nobody any favours if you do diversity badly, you have to say, okay we are going to be diverse for the right reasons, because we want to represent our audience, and we must find the best people, and if they aren’t immediately Infront of us, well do some research, pick up the phone, who have you met that is really, really good at their job, that maybe hasn’t appeared on our radar, maybe they haven’t pushed themselves forwards yet, and maybe we need to go and get them and encourage them, because we have to change the culture where by, the best talent and the best diverse talent comes to the fore, because the culture is there where they are welcomed.

You clearly made news, 2007, when you were the first women to commentate on match of the day, seems like a long time ago now, can you give us a little bit of a back story? I guess it didn’t just happen, or maybe it did just happen, how did that come about? 

Well it came about because I was commentating regularly on Premier League football for 5-live, and people who did that tended to be invited to do a game for Match of The Day, and that is precisely what happened. 

So, when I was asked to do it, yes, I was thinking fantastic, but for goodness sake, it was one game and it was because I was regularly commentating on 5-live, and I didn’t think too much beyond that, there was sort of part of me, that had a little bit in the back of mind thinking will this get noticed, will it become a story, and I just thought I really hope not, because I had done everything previously to discourage any kind of attention for that reason. 

I was just a journalist, I wanted to tell the story, I did not want to become part of the story, and so I just wanted to seamlessly slot in. Therefore, I didn’t  tell anyone, and I just hoped it wouldn’t find its way back into the national media, there was no twitter in those days, and unfortunately that was very naive, and of course it made its way into The Daily Mail on the Tuesday, before the Saturday, and that is where it all sorted. 

Unfortunately, there was just this hideous build-up in which I was front page news, back page news, from Motty to totty was the headline in one paper, is football ready for Jacqui Oatley was the front page on The Guardian, a massive photograph on the front page of the telegraph, it was enormous, and I just felt this over whelming wave of pressure, and I felt extremely lonely and isolated at that time, because I was single, I was living in a flat on my own, I was just prepping and working the whole time, because I still felt I was fairly new in terms of commentary. Yes, I had been doing it for a few years, but certainly this was new, and I felt very much the focus it wasn’t so much on me with radio because again we didn’t have twitter, so I didn’t have any social media abuse or anything particularly. Nobody really notice, nobody really seemed to care, I felt I was doing an okay job, after initial major self-conscious nerves and stuff to start with. 

I did a couple of horrendous commentaries, purely because I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. Then, came through that, but TV again was just another matter. 

So, by the time the Saturday came after I had every phone been debating whether I should be allowed to do it, my radio alarm that I woke up too on the Wednesday or Thursday morning at seven o’clock had Rachel Burden, a good friend of mine actually, on 5-live, asking the question should a female be allowed to commentate on Match of The Day. It wasn’t her question of course; it was the subject. 

I just remember feeling in the eye of the storm, thinking oh my goodness what is going on. I had all these phone calls of support form other commentators saying I can’t believe this, this is ridiculous, I had loads of texts and emails from colleagues I had met in local radio, national media over the years, asking for interviews and I stupidly wrote extensive emails and texts back explaining politely why I was going to decline, because I did not want to be the story, I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire, I just wanted the attention to go away, I didn’t want to be a celebrity, on the contrary I really didn’t want any profile whatsoever which is quite against the way a lot of people are now, but I just didn’t want that. 

I just wanted to be as good a football commentator as I could, and I worked so, so hard at it, I spent every spare minute doing prep which was actually a very bad idea, I should have been better at switching off, I’m still terrible at it switching off, and prep every spare minute now, I just juggle young children now which is you know another ingredient to the mix. 

But, it came, it went, I survived, there weren’t too man articles saying how terrible I was which was quite nice, but there was unfortunately a whole back page on the Monday morning on The Mail which was sad because it was entirely untrue, I don’t know where they had got their information form, that I had to go back the TV centre and write a script and re-dub the entire eight and a half minutes. It simply wasn’t true, I had done my commentary, I got down of the gantry and I went and interviewed the two managers and then wondered back to my car thinking okay this is weird, I’m use to me commentary going out live, but now I have got a few hours for this awful, awful thing to happen which I was actually expecting a boat load of abuse and what have you, and it was really weird. 

So, to see that on the Monday morning, it was just so disheartening because I had no come back. 

What can you do it that situation?

With hindsight, and this is nearly 13 years ago, I was so naive then, I didn’t know how it worked, I felt like I had nobody who had my back, and that is not criticism of anybody, it is just how I felt. I just felt there should have been an apology, I wish I phoned them up myself, I wish I got the journalists phone number, and said why did you write that, who told you that, it is simply not true. 

Yeah, but as it was, I got my head down, I did what I always did and just worked hard, worked even harder, and did the very best job I could, but it was a very different era then, there was no social media. I think it is a double edge sward, yes I would have got a boat load of abuse, it would have been horrible, but equally had I of been on twitter at that time, then people would have known that I was completely immersed in football, I went to matches every week, they might have known my background, but I had no online footprint then. 

I guess moving onto now, when you do have an online footprint and Twitter, and obviously fantastic that you were recently appointment as the new host of Sky Sport Sunday Supplement, so a huge congratulations again, more ground breaking appointments, and amongst I guess all that huge praise and the positive messages from fans and media colleagues, there are also once again, but now on twitter some really sexist comments. I think my reaction always is a mix of shock that these attitudes still exist, and then amusement almost at the stupidity of some of them. They usually have nine or ten followers. 

Are you still surprised to see those comments at this time?

Amused I think, I have just got to show you one that I found yesterday that I saved just to show my husband at breakfast because it made me laugh quite a lot. 

This guy: ‘I use to religiously watch this programme every week until it turned into womens hour’, which is very funny because we didn’t even talk about womens football, and there were not women on the panel, there was literally just me presenting it. 

That actually made me laugh, and now with all this experience, and it is almost like a comfort blanket having that experience because it is not so much easier, but it just feels so much more natural to do your job, and I do feel much more excepted now, I don’t feel like I’m fighting fires at all, and when I get comment purely based on my gender, honestly I can tell you truthy it is water of a ducks back, because what are you supposed to do with that, what does that even mean?

If somebody says, I thought the way you asked that question was terrible, then I might be a bit oh hang on a minute, and I might watch that back and think actually he has got a point and I will learn from it, I genuinely do take any of those kind of things on bored, if it was something critical of my style, or something I had said, but I haven’t actually had those comments. It has purely been gender based, but I have had a couple which have actually made me smile, which have been tweets of apology. 

I have had a couple of those, and I have actually been really grateful to those because it takes guts to say, I was one of those people that slagged you off, token appointment, and actually I was wrong. So, I have tweeted them back saying, thank you, I really appreciate the message. 

I think it just shows that perhaps we are making progress, that yes it is frustrating that you got that message in the first place but actually maybe we are moving forwards that people are watching us and appreciating us for the jobs that we are doing, rather than the gender that we are. 

Do you think it is worse in football, and football commentary than in cricket and rugby, when you have other women commenting on males playing sport? 

I think it has been. I’m really good friends with Alison Mitchell, and our careers have gone hand in hand really, and she is outstanding and what she does, and she said she has never had any of this, and you might think cricket is male dominated but, dare I suggest that possibly some of the cricketing audience is a little bit more grown up on occasion, than some of the football audience. 

She hasn’t had any of that, she really hasn’t, and I’m so happy for her that she hasn’t. Maybe it is just that she is really good at what she does! 

Maggie Alphonsi, she says the same thing, she doesn’t mind people calling her out because she just made the wrong comment or they disagree with her, but about being a woman, she hasn’t had much of that. I think people were surprised to see a woman commentating on the mens world cup, but it not in the way the vitriol seems to follow football commentary? 

I think Maggie is a bit different because she won the world cup as a rugby player, and one of the comments when I started doing match of the day was, well show us your medals, what have you won, and of course those sort of comments make you laugh, because well what has John Watson won, what have any of the other commentators, when did they play, or how many medals have they got? 

So, those kinds of things honestly, I couldn’t give a stuff about things like that, but I think it just has been a matter a of time. 

Going back to the comment about going into Curry’s or Maplin’s or whatever, that subconscious bias that a lot of people have, I think it takes a few years for us to really tred new ground, and once that ground has been trodden, then other people follow and it’s not such a big deal. 

I’m going to move onto darts, because obviously that is another passion of yours bit part of your work on TV. Why darts would be my first question?  

Well that is a very simple one, because I was rung up one day by somebody senior at ITV who completely out of the blue offered me a contract. Now, I had worked with him before so I knew him, but no I had absolutely no idea it was coming. 

The contract involved a certain amount of days on football and a certain number of days on darts, and I had never worked on darts, it is on in our house, we would watch the Premier League, my husband and I watch all sort of sport anyway. So, I knew who the players were and what have you, but I didn’t ever think I would be working on darts, it just wasn’t something I sort would happen.

So, when I was asked to do it, I jumped at it, absolutely jumped it, but it was a steep learning curve because it is a very, very different sport to others I have covered, but I think the principles are the same, and my roles as a presenter, not a commentator by the way, as a presenter, is to ask question of those who have played the sport, partly from a base of sport, but partly on behalf of the audience at home who may be avid darts fans, and some of them may be interested darts spectators that want to know more. 

So, I grabbed it with both hand and did as much research as I could, and really got an idea of that world, that you can’t know about until you start working it, which you can’t know about because it is a very different world. 

I have to say I absolutely adore it; I just love it the ITV team we are all so into it, and we just love, love working on it, it is an absolute privilege.  

Obviously, Fallon Sherrock, brought me to darts with year anyway, but do you think that will have a huge impact moving forward in terms of having women coming into the sport and attracting a new audience?

Well this has been an absolute revelation because there aren’t too many sports first left are there, there really aren’t too many, so when you have something like Fallon achieved at the World Darts Championships, which is open to women by the way. It is not a closed shot, it never has been, that is not the case, it is just that they have their own BDO Womens Championship. Now they have set up two qualifying tournaments especially for women so it does encourage them, there will be too places. 

But, it is just a case of a woman breaking that barrier, of winning a match at a PGC World Championship, and that was a first. Then, for her to follow it up to win again against Mensur Suljovic, who is one of the best players in the world, and okay she had a lot of people on her side and people booing the opponent and that is another debate, but she was so cool and so calm, and with darts being such a meritocracy, it is not like football where you can’t have men playing against women, you can absolutely have women playing against men in darts. 

There is that phycological barrier for the men, whatever people say, they really don’t want to be on that big stage being booed and being beaten by a woman, even though Ted Evetts was incredibly magnanimous, and one of a new bread, a young lad, a bit different for him. 

It was phenomenal. The impact, the PDC were astonished at the fact that she was on Good Morning Britain within a few hours, BBC breakfast, all over the world, she was doing every interview she could whilst the attention was on her and on darts, and it has resulted in her being invited to all the world series events. 

There are a few issues, maybe some male players will be like hang on I have been on the circuit for years, I don’t get invited, but it is the fact that they are trying to grow the game into different territories, and those two victories, and that first one almost overnight changed darts forever. 

She will be in the UK open in a few days’ time, and so too will Lisa Ashton, who won a tour card as a professional for the next couple of years, which is fantastic. So, it is not just Fallon, it was Fallon that grabbed the headlines, but the likes Lisa, Mikuru Suzuki, who is the back to back womens champion, they are breaking new ground. 

I’m going to move on now, so 2016 you were awarded an MBE for your services to broadcasting and diversity in sport. I loved your quote at the time you said ‘I excepted on behalf of every little girl that has been told she shouldn’t play football, and every woman that has been told to stay out of the press box’, so it seems that having an impact on women in the future is something that is very important to you, do you think that has always been the case, or is something that has evolved over time?

Well it is really interesting because when I came into sports broadcasting in particularly on the football side of things, it was for the same reason that any lad would aspire to go into that industry, because you are madly passionate about your sport, and you’d love to work in that world. 

So, initially I didn’t have that oh I’m going to be a woman in a man’s world, because it was my world, I didn’t feel like I was entering their world. I was just me, but of course it became abundantly clear that there weren’t many, if any, other women in the press box. 

So, I found myself entering this world whereby I was being asked about being the only woman to do this, or the first woman to do that, and we don’t have women round here, or can I have another lump of sugar in that please love. So, it became clear but again I feel that life experience I had of having travelled round the world, of having lived in Germany when I was 19 years of age for a year, which was very, very difficult actually, having had that life experience of being a manager, and having been a girl in my sixth form where there were very few girls, but I was the only one who was mad, mad, mad into football, I kind of built up all those experience, and was able to cope with it. 

So, going through that existence of being in my early days in sports journalism, and sort of working my way up the ladder, I realised how important it was to try to mentor other women whenever I got the chance, or girls, or be available or do interviews, and certainly before I had kids I was spending any day off I had meeting up with students, and spending half a day with them. 

I spent a lot of time in Café Nero in Ealing where I was living at the time, meeting students on a weekly basis and giving them half a day to talk to them, and now unfortunately I get all these emails, and I slightly panic because I flag them up, and I think I must reply, it is so important that I reply, but finding a spare minute to even file invoices or anything like that is just so, so difficult, especially with children now, it is just really, really hard, but I do feel that  the mentoring side of things is really important, because I didn’t really have that. I met Eleanor Oldroyd early on, and she was just wonderful, every knows what Ellie Oldroyd is like, she is just a fantastic character, and having met with her and she had just done an interview and she gave me some time to talk through how she does match reporting and that kind of thing, and I was so, so grateful, to her for her advice and her attitude, and I just thought I need to be that person for anybody that wants advice about getting into this business, and not just getting in and cracking on from a professional point of view because obviously it is not just women, it is boys as well, and lads, but I find the other side of things to be a responsibility that I have taken on, and I don’t mean to sound condescending when I say that, but I do feel like a big sister kind of figure to some of these women, and I get frustrated when I see them struggling. 

I had an incident in a press box just last weekend, where I was downstairs but the young female broadcaster messaged me saying this dinosaur guy has just been so nasty being like why are you here, what are you doing, yeah, it is so unusual in this day and age, and I was really cross, but he hadn’t done it in front of me and had it done it in front of me, and I have experienced it with him for years by the way, and he is still going, it makes me really cross, she had done nothing wrong, she wasn’t in his seat, she wasn’t stealing his ISDM point, she had done nothing wrong. She just didn’t know who he was, and he was hugely offended and it was pathetic really, so I think things like that where somebody is upset that they have been made to feel very, very small purely because of their gender, then I think it is important to be on the end of the phone, or if you see somebody breaking through, or they have made the headlines, or somethings happened, or a manager has been vile to them, then I do pick up the phone on a Monday morning and just see if they want to chat about it. 

All of these things I have experienced myself, I have been shouted at my managers, and had a few ridiculous comments, and put downs, and if you stretch it out over 18 years it is not many per season at all, but it feels horrible at the time, and of course social media now is another element of it too, where by tweets that people receive can make them feel pretty rubbish, so I think and having been through all those kind of things and grown those layers of skin to be able to deflect that kind of unwanted attention, I do think it is important to share that experience and explain to them, it is not you, it is him. As I did in the press box on Saturday, when I saw that journalist, I said just remember he does that to every female, it is not you it is him, and in time it wont feel as bad. 

In terms of Women in Football, and what that has done, do you think that has helped, is helping women coming through in terms of the sector as a whole?

What women in Football have done in this country I think is just phenomenal, it really is, started by Anna Kessel, and Shelley Alexander, who simply wanted to make a positive difference, and they got a few of us on board early on, in that upstairs room in a pub in 2007, just after my first match of the day, and no staff, no expenses, no nothing, we would just meet up and initially the meet ups were quite often women off-loading about the negative experiences they’d had. 

They weren’t meant to be a ‘moan-up’ at all they certainly were never anti-men as I think occasionally the outside perception might have been, it was just difficult really being a women in football when often you would be only women in the press box, or the only women in the marketing department or the only women in the dressing room, or on the bench, and it wasn’t all negative by any stretch, but some people did have very difficult experience, and it was a case of getting together and sharing those experiences because a problem shared is a problem halved, but beyond that it then developed into something where by we would seek out leaders in various industries and get them to appreciate the issues, and make a practical difference by encouraging them to understand some of the problems, why it is important to have a diverse work force, certainly for a gender diversity point of view, there are studies that prove it is better for your business to have diversity in it. 

I think what those women have achieved, the likes of Ebru Koksal so who comes over from Turkey and puts on these women in leadership courses for people working in football, she does it for free by the way, she use to be chief executive at Galatasaray, she has vast experience. Those practical difference that I keep referring too, make a vast difference in the industry. 

I think a lot of it with women is about confidence, because if you feel like you are mistrusted by your colleagues, because ah what would she know, she is a women, my wife, my daughters don’t know anything about football, I bet she doesn’t either, that kind of miss trust can be quite grating, and quite tiring, and quite difficult to prove yourself, when you really you just want to be judged on your own merits, not purely on your merits, so I think what Women in Football have done to make that difference and change the landscape of football in this country and just remind people that just because womens football was banned for 50 years in this country, doesn’t mean that those women who never got to play, cant possibly know anything about football, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be given opportunities. 

It is a shame that ban happened, because I think that really did set us back and that is the only reason really I think why we didn’t have a generation of footballers that we see now with Phil Neville’s team, we had perfectly capable, talented players, they just weren’t able to thrive, in the same way that I could never kick a ball in a local team because there wasn’t such a creature. 

I think now we have made huge strides, the ‘What if’ campaign was just phenomenal and the backing from the football industry of the likes of Miles Jacobson at Football Manager, and people who are making these pledges to do very, very different tasks that make a difference, and it is phenomenal and I think being a women in football now is way less of a big deal, and that is just the way it should be.