Kelly Cates Plans Two-Week Holiday After First Match of the Day Season
Kelly Cates has found a brief summer break after her first year as a Match of the Day host. She plans to take a couple of weeks away with her daughters, even with the football calendar running straight through the summer.
She said the schedule has tightened rather than eased as the season has gone on. The World Cup final falls on July 19, and the next Premier League season begins barely a month later.
Cates and the Match of the Day trio
Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan took over from Gary Lineker at the beginning of the campaign, and she said the transition has been helped by familiarity inside the presenting team. “I've worked with [the Match of the Day pundits] before. There's nobody who's been brand new to me, that was really nice, but that helps me and it just helps to have some continuity,” she said.
Her first season has also lasted longer than it looked it might at one stage. “I think there was definitely a point this season where we thought this might be over by March,” Cates said at the Sport Industry Awards. Instead, the run-in has delivered a title race, a relegation battle and battles for European places, keeping the show busy into the final weeks.
World Cup turnaround for and ITV
The summer does not bring a clean stop for the presenting team. Cates said all three Match of the Day hosts have responsibilities for the World Cup, with the and ITV sharing matches across the expanded tournament.
She described the coming months as compressed from start to finish. “It's such a quick turnaround and then even after the World Cup, although they pushed the start of the season back, it's a really short space then as well,” she said. “So it’s going to be a whistle-stop tour of football, but that's how I like it.”
Two weeks with her daughters
That is why the holiday matters to her summer more than the length suggests. “I've got a couple of weeks away with my daughters, then they've got school and they've got exams and all these kinds of things. So between them and me, we've kind of found two weeks to just go on holiday somewhere,” Cates said.
For a presenter in the middle of a first season on one of football’s biggest weekly shows, the pause is short and carefully fitted around family commitments. After that, the schedule moves quickly back into World Cup work and then the new league campaign.
