Broadcaster Kelly Cates admits it ‘killed’ her having to keep news of her appointment as Match of the Day host a secret even from close friends.
Sky Sports presenter Cates will be one of the new-look presenting team that will take over from Gary Lineker next season.
Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan will make up the rest of the trio, who will take it in turns to host the BBC’s Saturday evening Premier League highlights show.
Kelly Cates compares presenting job to having a baby
All three will already be familiar faces to viewers from their various presenting roles over the years, with Chapman and Logan both regularly filling in for Lineker whenever he has been unable to take to the chair.
Cates has meanwhile become one of the leading football presenters in the country since getting her break as part of the original Sky Sports News line-up upon its launch in 1998.
Speaking on Kate Thornton’s White Wine Question Time podcast, Cates said: “I’m no good at secrets. It killed me.
“Once the news was announced, I genuinely could have slept for about two days. I found the stress of keeping the secret really hard.
“And even though it’s a nice secret, it’s kind of it was a little bit like the early stages of pregnancy where you feel terrible but you can’t tell anybody and you’re like, but then every now and again, there’s that.
“You get that little feeling where you go, I’ve got a really lovely secret, and I can’t tell anybody. It was awful. And I was lying to genuinely good friends. Or at least lying by omission.”
Cates continued: “It was awful. I hated it. But I had the conversation fairly early on about and all in very vague terms, because I was already doing radio for the BBC.
“I was already working on Five Live, and so it was natural for me to have meetings when a new boss came in and everything was being changed, and so that was quite natural.
“And then during one of those meetings, it was, well, you know, we’re rethinking how we’re going to do Match of the Day. And would you be interested in being in the mix?
“Inside I just couldn’t wait for the meeting to end just to go, oh my God this is just incredible.”
The broadcaster has no compunction about sharing the hosting duties with Logan and Chapman – a significant move away from the programme’s long-standing tradition of having just one regular anchor.
Kenneth Wolstenholme, David Coleman, Jimmy Hill, Des Lynam and now Lineker have successively been the lead presenter since its launch in 1964.
Cates believes going with a rotating trio serves everyone best now, though, saying: I think people have a perception that it’s a massively ego filled world, and it is at times, and you have to have a certain amount of ego to feel that you can do the job.
“You have to have a certain amount of confidence. What you don’t want to be in a position is you don’t want to be in the position where you feel that we’re all trying to step over each other and scramble over each other, and the fact that we’re all, you know, the same age, we’re all at the same stage of our careers.
“We’ve all got other things outside of Match of the Day that we’re passionate about and really invested in.
“It means that none of us are a kind of treading on each other because of our own insecurities. We’re all really comfortable with who we are and where we are in our careers.
“So, it really it works for all of us. And we’re all at a stage in our real lives as well, where we want to be able to spend time with our families.
“We’ve got kids at different ages and different things going on in our in our home lives as well, which is nice to be able to keep all that in the mix.”
