25 July 2023 , 16:00
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As far as sliding doors moments go, Jacqui Oatley’s is pretty memorable.
She was 25 and, in her own words, “screaming in agony” on a football pitch in west London. She’d dislocated her kneecap while playing for Chiswick Ladies - an injury that would see her undergo several surgeries and spend 10 months on crutches, prompting the unhappy curtailment of her amateur playing days.
Football wasn’t Oatley’s full-time job, despite the fact that she had caught the bug for the beautiful game as a child when she’d whiled away the hours honing her keepy uppy technique in the streets of her native Wolverhampton. Having relocated to London following a post-graduation gap year, she opted to work in intellectual property, though every Sunday she would lace up her boots and turn out for Chiswick in the Greater London league.
“I’d always had it in the back of my mind that I might want to work in sport,” she tells Mirror Football. “I listened to 5 Live all the time. Every time I’d be at a match I’d look up at the press box and see the reporter I was listening to in my ear and I was quite transfixed by the thought of it but I didn’t have the faintest idea what it involved.”
It was only when Oatley was told she could no longer play football that thought blossomed into a full-blown desire to swap the financial stability of her full-time job for a post-grad in Broadcast Journalism at Sheffield Hallam.
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“That day I dislocated my knee was quite a Sliding Doors moment,” she says, referring to the 1998 cult-classic Gwyneth Paltrow rom-com
“I only watched the film recently, flying back from America, and I think that actually really was what it was like for me. That moment when I was lying there on the turf was the moment when I realised I had to be involved in sport in some way, and the rest is history.”
To distil Oatley’s esteemed, 22-year broadcast career into that one, seven-letter word is to do her a great disservice. Over the past two decades, she has worked on 16 major tournaments, been awarded an MBE and broken plenty of new ground as a woman in sports media.
Last week, she was in the gantry of the 83,500-capacity Stadium Australia in Sydney for the opening game of the Women’s World Cup, however, her commentary career began in far more humble surroundings.
“I was freelancing for BBC Leeds while I was doing my post-grad and I had a slot doing the non-league football in West Yorkshire which I absolutely loved with a passion,” she says.
“I asked the sports editor if I could try commentary and sure enough one day I was asked to commentate on Wakefield & Emley vs Worksop Town. My heart started racing a million miles an hour.
“It was the worst commentary position, really low and set back in the corner, and the players all had short dark hair so it was impossible to recognise them. But even though I found it extremely difficult and not at all enjoyable I really had a taste for it and I knew I wanted to pursue it and work my way up from there.”
Oatley has worked as both a commentator and presenter (Twitter@https://twitter.com/HighRollerRadio)It wasn’t long before Oatley was freelancing for 5 Live, where she became the first woman to commentate on a football match on British network radio. She followed up that seismic feat with yet another milestone in 2007 when she became the first female football commentator to feature on Match of the Day.
The match itself - a 1-1 draw between Fulham and Blackburn Rovers - was pretty unremarkable however the well-documented fanfare that greeted Oatley’s commentary was anything but.
“It wasn’t much fun because all I wanted to do was get my head down and do the game,” she recalls. “Unfortunately that didn’t materialise and it was a complete circus and not something I was comfortable with at all.
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“One of the first things you learn when you study journalism is don’t become the story and I had no intention of doing so. I didn’t give a single interview at the time and just tried to ignore all of the nonsense that was said about me - and there was a lot of nonsense.
“Now there are countless female commentators and I’m absolutely chuffed about that. That’s how it should have been a long time ago so I’m really pleased we’ve finally arrived at this situation.”
But, in the age of social media when, as Oatley concedes, “you’re only one slip away from an avalanche”, how difficult is it to block out any external clamour?
“Having done it for so long is a big thing but also just working extremely hard and really just being the best I can possibly be in every single game is all I try to do,” she said.
“I work really hard on commentary prep. I’ve also juggled different roles presenting and hosting events so doing all of those different roles has just given me such a broad base of experience which I can then call on in any situation. I just enjoy it now, I think that’s the key thing.”
And Oatley will be calling on that wealth of experience at the Women’s World Cup this summer, where she’s commentating for FOX Sports in America alongside match analyst and former USA midfielder Lori Lindsey.
Preparations for major tournaments - of which this is Oatley’s 17th - is an arduous business. She spent 12 hours a day working in her home office in the build-up to the men’s World Cup in Qatar, with commentary prep usually taking her “weeks rather than days”.
Oatley was the first woman to commentate on Match of The Day (Getty)While jetting off for a summer down under may sound glamorous in prospect, the pretty rigorous travel schedule coupled with the wrench of being away from family means major tournaments don’t come without their challenges, but Oatley’s passion for the job is showing no signs of waning.
“The love for it is as strong as ever, if not stronger,” she says. “It does get harder, especially with the wrench of leaving family behind.
“This time the tournament is in the summer holidays which makes it so much harder because the kids aren’t at school. I love doing men’s and women’s football and I’m so lucky I get to do both but there’s something I love about prepping for the Women’s World Cup because a lot of the backstories are just incredible.
“I never take a single second of it for granted. I’m so excited for this summer and I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”