Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishEighteen years have passed since Jacqui Oatley became the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day, the BBC’s flagship football highlights programme. Enough time, she points out, for someone not even born back then to have learned to drive.The furore around Oatley’s commentary of Fulham’s 1-1 draw against Blackburn Rovers in the Premier League on April 21, 2007, bore no resemblance to Oatley’s introduction to American audiences more than a decade later, first with the 2022 men’s World Cup for Fox before covering the NWSL. “It was an absolute dream doing men’s World Cup for them, because you’re not being assessed by: it’s a female commentator — get back in the kitchen,” she says. “I wouldn’t still be doing it if I was experiencing what I did all those years ago.”Oatley has taken a break from meetings about the inaugural Festival of Women’s Football Awards, which she will help judge, to reflect on what has changed since her first TV commentary in 2007. “What a life experience that was,” she tells The Athletic. “I came through it. I’m still here. I’m still doing the job 18 years later. I’m actually really proud of that because it would have been so much easier to go: ‘OK. Let’s just kind of hide behind the scenes’.”She had started that week in 2007 thinking her biggest challenge would be adapting to the nuances of TV commentary. For years prior, she had honed her craft offering live commentary and reports on radio — the Match of the Day gig would involve an editor clipping Oatley’s 90-minute commentary, recorded ‘as live’ at Craven Cottage, into an eight-and-a-half-minute audio package to air over the match footage.Oatley recalls the stomach-drop moment when she realised that she had, in fact, become the story — the very thing her journalism training at university had told her not to do. On Tuesday, the English newspaper Daily Mail ran a news-in-brief style piece about Oatley’s appointment. Oatley’s radio alarm woke her up at 7am on the Wednesday morning with the sound of Radio 5 Live and the presenter Rachel Burden, who Oatley “loves to bits”, introducing vox pops from members of the public who had been asked whether Oatley should be allowed to do it.“I’m sure Rachel thought it was nuts at the time, but that was the story,“ Oatley recalls. ”My heart sank. My heart sank.” Oatley learned that the Mail had run that day a full-page spread debating the same question, “and that’s when it really grew legs with the sexism element”.
Jacqui Oatley commentating for Match of the Day for the first time (Julian Finney/Getty Images)Oatley fielded countless messages from journalists across the world who had got in touch with her, either with well wishes or interview requests, and replied to them all personally (with hindsight, she says, that could have waited) as she tried to keep a lid on the madness. One journalist colleague sent word that reporters were “trying to dig into my home life to see if there was any juiciness” — specifically, whether she was a lesbian.“And I remember thinking, ‘How would that even be a story if that was the case?’. But they’re also thinking, you like football, so you must… it just shows, doesn’t it, the kind of attachments that people made to women who loved football at the time. You think, ‘What? Can we just not be? Can we just not exist in the same world without being judged in any kind of way?’. But again, it’s 18 years ago. Hopefully all that’s moved on, too.”By Friday, Oatley had hardly slept or eaten, let alone had much time to prepare for the commentary in the way she wanted. “My only regret was that I couldn’t be at my best for the most-watched game of my life. I’d love for it all to have stopped and just gone away. But that was never an option.”She was conscious, too, that the first few women in any space are so often perceived as representatives of a whole sex: that putting a foot wrong might make it harder for the next ones to follow.“I was really conscious that if I’d commentated and people hated the sound of my voice, or they just didn’t trust me to convey what was going on…” She tails off, pointing out that this was a very different kind of anxiety to doubts over her ability, of which she had none as a woman who had put in the yards as a fan and, later, journalist.“It was purely the judging of my gender. I wanted to do a good job, but also hang around and stay around, not just do it on that day. Because people do make assessments of an entire gender based on that kind of thing, which is hilarious and ridiculous at the same time.”Finally doing the commentary itself, Oatley says, felt like “hanging in mid-air with my legs dangling over London and not knowing what to do or how to get down”. That no one would hear it until the evening placed her in a stasis where she couldn’t feel any relief.In his post-match interview, the then-Blackburn manager, Mark Hughes, asked her how it went. Then she walked to her car in a daze, drove home and called Alison Mitchell, the cricket commentator, and 5 Live presenter Phil Williams to arrange a night out and “drink a lot of vodka to make it possible to deal with the final thing”. She paced the hallway of Mitchell’s flat, who called reassurances from the living room as Oatley listened and decided her efforts “didn’t sound too horrendous. I just needed to get through it”.Knowingly, the Match of the Day presenter, Gary Lineker, introduced Oatley’s segment with the words: “After all the publicity this week, the moment has finally come for a little piece of history on Match of the Day. For the first time ever, Lawrie Sanchez took charge of his Fulham side at Craven Cottage. Also making her debut, commentator Jacqui Oatley.”
Jacqui Oatley presents an FA Cup first-round match between Aldershot Town and Bradford City for the BBC on November 8, 2015 (Ben Hoskins/Getty Images)There are scores of female commentators now, and Oatley loves the moment “when I hear somebody and I don’t know who they are” because it indicates not only a growing pool but that football has moved on from making these women the story.Social media, though, brings new challenges for the next generation, more so when broadcasters’ attempts to diversify their talent become drawn into a broader culture war. Oatley muses whether social media might also have helped her, familiarising her would-be critics with her credentials. She doubts that the backlash came from listeners familiar with her radio work.“A quick Google search and: ‘OK, she’s been around for years and she’s done this and she’s done that, and actually her credentials are not any different to a male’,” Oatley says. “That would have helped my cause. Or, I could have put one post out there and maybe set the record straight on a couple of things on the inaccuracies. But I had no voice. I didn’t have that option.”Oatley has learned in the interim about “how to survive in this industry, which sounds a bit dramatic, but it is quite a solitary industry”. Oatley lived on her own in a flat; by definition, nobody else had been Match of the Day’s first female commentator. “So there wasn’t anybody that I could find and say: ‘OK, what do I do now?’. I was navigating the situation by myself.”Shortly after, she was among the founding members of the Women in Football (WIF) network, alongside Anna Kessel, the former Guardian journalist, and the BBC’s Shelley Alexander, with the organisation formed partly “in light of that craziness” Oatley had endured. Above a pub in Soho, the plan had been to assemble a network of like-minded people from different parts of industry: agents, reporters, physios, executives who had weathered their own storms in silos as the only women in their workplaces.When the talk moved from emotional support to event planning, some football clubs and bodies, Oatley says, were “really wary about housing us or accommodating us because they didn’t want to be seen to be enabling women in football. It sounds weird now, but it’s very much changed.” WIF has evolved into a more sophisticated body now, commissioning reports, offering legal advice and running leadership courses.Oatley describes her younger self as “marked, not scarred” by that first week, “isolated” and without any inkling of “what to do or how to handle it. I felt so strongly that I don’t want other people to experience that. And even though they’re not going to on that scale, I still understand that feeling of: ‘I’d love to commentate. How do I go about this? Who can put me in contact with people who can give me experience?’.”Oatley talks enthusiastically of her desire to help other women. She is free with her phone number when aspiring sports journalists get in touch. “Because we know what it can be like. The prejudice that we experienced all those years ago has not gone away entirely.”At the 2022 Qatar World Cup, Oatley became the first female to offer play-by-play commentary of a World Cup match in the United States. “I’d forgotten about that,” Oatley admits — a sign, if there was one, of how far removed she felt from 18 years earlier and a week she will always remember.(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
