Latest news with #Oatley
New York Post
23-06-2025
- Health
- New York Post
3 easy, healthy foods you can grow at home — even if you only have a window sill
Talk about a plant-based diet. You don't actually need a green thumb to start growing your own healthy food at home, promises Welsh chef and influencer Gaz Oakley — in fact, you don't even need a garden or a yard. Oakley says there are several things you can grow inside your house or apartment with just a sunny window, some soil and water — and he handpicked the three easiest, most low-maintenance foods that have tons of nutritional value. 'I've actually started doing this as an experiment to show people that you don't need space,' he told The Post. 5 Chef and influencer Gaz Oakley told The Post that there are several things you can grow inside your house or apartment with just a sunny window, some soil and water. Tom Lewis #1: Microgreens 'I think the most nutritious thing you could start off with and that takes up a limited space is microgreens,' said Oakley, who recently published 'Plant to Plate: Delicious and Versatile Plant-Forward Recipes.' These come in lots of varieties and include cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, watercress, radish, arugula, radicchio, chard, spinach, chives, dill, endive, and herbs like mint, basil, rosemary, sage and oregano — all harvested when they're small and young. Nutrients in microgreens are more concentrated than in full-grown plants, meaning they pack 4 to 40 times as much nutritional punch. Kale, for example, has tons of vitamins You don't need any special equipment, either. He uses a cut-open Oatley milk carton, fills it with soil and sprinkles in seeds. 5 Microgreens are easy to grow at home. ronstik – 'They need just sunlight, so you need to be putting them somewhere where there's sun, and give them daily watering,' he recommended. 'I always say most vegetables are less sensitive than your average house plants. House plants are the most drama queen plants I've ever known. You give them everything and they just die, and it's really annoying. But vegetables, they're a bit more resilient.' 5 Oakley's new book, 'Plant to Plate,' is out now Quadrille You can harvest these after about eight days when they're around two inches tall, and they'll continue to grow back over and over again. 'They're so nutritious and you should eat them right away that they're incredible for you,' said Oakley, who recommends them as toppings or ingredients for smoothies. #2: Tomatoes Tomatoes are great for your heart, lungs, eyes, skin, teeth and blood vessels. Besides vitamins C and K, potassium and folate, they're packed with the antioxidant lycopene — which can lower your risk of cancer and help manage a bunch of diseases. Oakley says these are very easy to grow — and planting these in front of a sunny window will 'all be worth it.' 5 Tomatoes are great for your heart, lungs, eyes, skin, teeth and blood vessels. 'You just need a small bucket with some holes in the bottom. Put a plate underneath it. Or you can go fancy and get a nice terracotta pot and fill it with some compost,' he said. 'You can get it to buy a tomato plant from a garden center, or you can sow your seeds into a little tray first and then transplant it. Water every now and then, and maybe give it some support with a piece of bamboo. 'And then in about two months' time, you will have tomatoes to harvest.' End up with more tomatoes than you can eat? Oakley recommends fermenting them into something like his tomato kimchi recipe. It's 'so delicious,' he said — and you get that extra bang for your buck since fermented foods are great for gut health. 5 Finally, lettuce is great if your home doesn't get much sunlight. geshas – #3 Lettuce If your home doesn't get a ton of sunlight, you should still be able to grow lettuce — and it does best in spring and autumn climates. No special planters necessary for this, either: He grows his in an old pipe split in half, filled with compost. 'Sprinkle some lettuce seeds on top, water every now and then, and within about 21 days, you'll have lettuce,' he said. 'Pick the outer leaves and then leave the center leaves to grow and get bigger.' Even if lettuce doesn't get you terribly excited, it's certainly versatile — and full of vitamin K (good for blood and bones), flavonoids (gets rid of those free radicals), and the 'eye vitamin' lutein.
The Age
22-05-2025
- General
- The Age
‘You don't know what you're missing out on': Meet Australia's new Mrs Thrifty
Looking back, it seemed like the unlikeliest of friendships. What could a leftie, art-collecting, inner-city gay couple possibly have in common with church-going, devoutly conservative grandparents from deep in the 'burbs? And yet, over a bubbling kitchen cauldron and alongside rows of antique jars filled with all manner of preserved goodies, it turns out, quite a bit. Oatley retirees Maris and Mick Cummins are now dear friends who inspired a revolution in my pantry. I am no longer a slave to the supermarket, my garbage bins are significantly emptier and I have rediscovered a lost family tradition of preserving nature's abundance. I first met Maris and retired accountant Mick inside the bustling arts and crafts pavilion at the 2012 Royal Easter Show among the prize-winning doilies and championship fruit cakes. My art-collecting partner, Scott, was negotiating to buy an intricate floral sculpture Maris entered into competition, replete with tiny bees and caterpillars, meticulously crafted out of thousands of tiny glass beads. I mentioned the impressive preserves in a nearby showcase and that I had inherited my late mother's 70-year-old Fowlers Vacola stove-top preserving kit. My mum's old metal boiler was nicknamed 'Macbeth'. It would spend days on the slow-combustion wood stove when Dad's peach, apple and pear trees were heaving with fruit. Fowlers, which is still going strong today, even had its own cartoon mascot, Mrs B. Thrifty. Maris' eyes widened with excitement. 'But why aren't you using it?' she demanded to know after I lamented that the preserving kit was gathering dust in a shed. I was never really a fan of the 'mushy' peaches. 'I've got one too,' she said. 'Forget about the peaches, you don't know what you're missing out on.' Over the next half-hour, Maris evangelised the merits of 'bottling' (the insiders' term for preserving), detailing the vast store of homemade pickles, relishes, jams and chutneys, along with preserved 'boozy' fruits and vegetables, curries, chickpeas, lentils, soups, casseroles and sauces, all stashed in hundreds of pressurised jars under her house. A week later, we arrived at the Cummins' house in Sydney's southern suburbs to collect the beaded flowers. It soon became clear Maris was, in fact, a modern-day, real-life Mrs B. Thrifty, living atop an Aladdin's cave of gourmet delights that could easily feed a small village for a year. Touring the backyard, we were shown beehives that produced up to 220 litres of honey a year (every drop assiduously recorded by Mick). Their flock of chickens laid at least five eggs a day. 'Too many for us!' Maris boasted smugly as we tiptoed through the chook poo in our pristine designer sneakers. I was never a fan of 'mushy' peaches … Today, however, I am a preserving convert. Later, she opened the fridge. ' Voila!' she declared. It was filled with homemade yoghurt, an impressive range of their own cheeses, including a veiny blue and delicious ricotta, and their own salami. Her shelves were stacked with homemade tomato ketchup, homemade baked beans and bottles of an 'adult' cordial labelled 'No Going Back!' . In her bathroom were lavender and sandalwood DIY soaps, a vast slab of which found its way home with us along with jars of goodies. I was amazed. How did this petite, devoted grandmother who volunteered for the church, was a passionate line dancer, beader and seamstress and still worked part-time, manage to do it all? 'I did have a pet chook growing up which I would make clothes for – smart little capes – but really, most of it I've done courses in and taught myself,' she said. 'It has to be practical, though. I like to keep busy, to make things with my hands … Mick has no choice but to go along for the ride.' In the early days, when trying to make tomato passata left the place looking like a murder scene, I felt a little like television's Margo Leadbetter, the social-climbing housewife from the BBC's 1970s sitcom The Good Life, hilariously clutching her pearls as her muddy neighbours, Tom and Barbara Good, wrestled pigs in their living room. Today, however, I am a preserving convert – and I am far from alone. The post-COVID-19 era, cost-of-living crisis, wellness trend, climate change, egg shortages and food-security concerns have conspired and inspired a new generation of everyday Australians to embrace a way of life more akin to how we lived long before supermarkets and online shopping. Inside arguably Australia's most successful community garden, St Kilda's Veg Out, a preserving and bottling shed is being built. Veg Out currently has a list of 15,000 people who engage either directly in the garden or shop at the adjacent farmers' market under the shadow of Luna Park. 'People want to preserve their harvest … the key to this garden's success is keeping people involved,' explains founder and president Rob Taylor, an actor who rallied the community and fought to save the former bowling club site from being sold off to developers. 'We got political. We got people out of the bars and cafes and into the garden, that was the only way to save the land from developers. This has been public recreational land since 1881, and we fought to keep it. Yes, there's a waiting list, and if you want a plot you have to show up and contribute to the gardens, but you don't have to wait for someone to die, you just have to earn it.' Loading While the toilet paper shortages made pandemic headlines, Aaron Whitehouse, the MD of Mr Fothergill's Seeds, noticed different items flying off the shelves. 'We had people going into shops and buying out the entire fruit and vegetable seed ranges – I'm talking seven-kilogram boxes of seed. People thought the world was ending,' says Whitehouse, whose company is one of Australia's biggest horticultural players. Post-pandemic, sales remain in double-digit annual growth and above pre-COVID levels. Whitehouse says, 'A new generation of people want to know how their food was grown, they're interested in freshness and want to take some control over their food supply.' The company recently launched an indoor hydroponic benchtop vegetable garden for apartment-dwellers, which comes with its own LED 'grow' light. ' 'Sustainability' has become such a fashionable term now, but this company has been doing exactly that for over a century,' says Fowlers' owner John Roy, who runs the North Melbourne business with his sister, Nicole. Fowlers started in 1915, when Joseph Fowler launched his eponymous preserving kit, which helped a generation survive the Great Depression. The company peaked in the 1950s and '60s but went into decline as supermarkets dominated and suburban blocks shrank. The Roy family bought Fowlers in 1993. Today, they are witnessing a renaissance. Fowlers now has its own Instagram page and celebrity ambassadors – and social media influencers – Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander have replaced Mrs B. Thrifty. In 2024, the Australia Institute and the Grow It Local urban farming movement conducted a national survey which indicated about 9 million Australians are growing some form of food, from a full-blown vegetable patch on a large block to a pot of herbs on an inner-city windowsill. Grow It Local co-founders Andrew Valder and Darryl Nichols established the enterprise over a decade ago, but the business 'got more serious around COVID', according to Bondi Beach-based Valder. Television personality Paul West, who featured in the series River Cottage Australia, joined the company, which now has 45,000 registered members. An undisclosed number of them pay a subscription fee for which they receive seeds, detailed growing information and regular tutorials. In late 2024, a crowdfunding initiative among members raised more than $500,000, which Valder says will fund further growth. 'We had all sorts of investors, from mums and dads to self-managed super funds,' Valder says. 'Some people invested $250, while I know of one who put in $50,000 … they all share our belief that growing your own food on any scale can help build healthier and more resilient communities and contribute to a more sustainable world. As our relationships with mobile phones and screens grows ever deeper … we offer an antidote for that.' In Byron Bay, beehive innovator Cedar Anderson is in total agreement: 'I think fundamentally humans yearn to farm, to produce their own food, whether that be a vegie patch in the backyard or keeping honey bees and harvesting honey.' Anderson is the co-creator of the revolutionary Flow Hive, which has transformed home beekeeping – 140,000 of the handcrafted timber units have sold globally over the past decade. With hives priced from about $1100 each, the business has ballooned into a multimillion-dollar operation, with a percentage of sales raising more than a million dollars towards bee preservation initiatives around the world, including combating the devastating Varroa mite. Loading As the national backyard chicken and fancy-breed domestic fowl population heads towards an estimated 2 million, former Wollongong builders Trevor and Dayna Tougher were inspired by Paul West's River Cottage series to quit the 'steel city' and buy a property in NSW's bucolic Southern Highlands. Today, their chicken coop business, The Poodle and the Hen, is booming. They also sell chooks for both eggs and meat. 'There has been a huge interest in chooks since COVID, especially now with all the press about egg shortages and people becoming more aware of aspects of the commercial egg and chicken production industry, specifically what they put into it,' Trevor Tougher says. Large, deluxe coops cost up to $50,000, while the more compact 'studio' range of coops for suburban homes are about $2000. Tougher has enough orders to see out the next nine months. 'Chooks are our main business now,' he says. Back in Oatley, rummaging around her underground food bunker for GW 's photographer, Maris Cummins has selected a few jars for us to sample over lunch, including a batch of her latest prized concoction: pickled red grapes. They look like plump jewels and taste sweet and juicy with a refreshing tartness.
Sydney Morning Herald
22-05-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘You don't know what you're missing out on': Meet Australia's new Mrs Thrifty
Looking back, it seemed like the unlikeliest of friendships. What could a leftie, art-collecting, inner-city gay couple possibly have in common with church-going, devoutly conservative grandparents from deep in the 'burbs? And yet, over a bubbling kitchen cauldron and alongside rows of antique jars filled with all manner of preserved goodies, it turns out, quite a bit. Oatley retirees Maris and Mick Cummins are now dear friends who inspired a revolution in my pantry. I am no longer a slave to the supermarket, my garbage bins are significantly emptier and I have rediscovered a lost family tradition of preserving nature's abundance. I first met Maris and retired accountant Mick inside the bustling arts and crafts pavilion at the 2012 Royal Easter Show among the prize-winning doilies and championship fruit cakes. My art-collecting partner, Scott, was negotiating to buy an intricate floral sculpture Maris entered into competition, replete with tiny bees and caterpillars, meticulously crafted out of thousands of tiny glass beads. I mentioned the impressive preserves in a nearby showcase and that I had inherited my late mother's 70-year-old Fowlers Vacola stove-top preserving kit. My mum's old metal boiler was nicknamed 'Macbeth'. It would spend days on the slow-combustion wood stove when Dad's peach, apple and pear trees were heaving with fruit. Fowlers, which is still going strong today, even had its own cartoon mascot, Mrs B. Thrifty. Maris' eyes widened with excitement. 'But why aren't you using it?' she demanded to know after I lamented that the preserving kit was gathering dust in a shed. I was never really a fan of the 'mushy' peaches. 'I've got one too,' she said. 'Forget about the peaches, you don't know what you're missing out on.' Over the next half-hour, Maris evangelised the merits of 'bottling' (the insiders' term for preserving), detailing the vast store of homemade pickles, relishes, jams and chutneys, along with preserved 'boozy' fruits and vegetables, curries, chickpeas, lentils, soups, casseroles and sauces, all stashed in hundreds of pressurised jars under her house. A week later, we arrived at the Cummins' house in Sydney's southern suburbs to collect the beaded flowers. It soon became clear Maris was, in fact, a modern-day, real-life Mrs B. Thrifty, living atop an Aladdin's cave of gourmet delights that could easily feed a small village for a year. Touring the backyard, we were shown beehives that produced up to 220 litres of honey a year (every drop assiduously recorded by Mick). Their flock of chickens laid at least five eggs a day. 'Too many for us!' Maris boasted smugly as we tiptoed through the chook poo in our pristine designer sneakers. I was never a fan of 'mushy' peaches … Today, however, I am a preserving convert. Later, she opened the fridge. ' Voila!' she declared. It was filled with homemade yoghurt, an impressive range of their own cheeses, including a veiny blue and delicious ricotta, and their own salami. Her shelves were stacked with homemade tomato ketchup, homemade baked beans and bottles of an 'adult' cordial labelled 'No Going Back!' . In her bathroom were lavender and sandalwood DIY soaps, a vast slab of which found its way home with us along with jars of goodies. I was amazed. How did this petite, devoted grandmother who volunteered for the church, was a passionate line dancer, beader and seamstress and still worked part-time, manage to do it all? 'I did have a pet chook growing up which I would make clothes for – smart little capes – but really, most of it I've done courses in and taught myself,' she said. 'It has to be practical, though. I like to keep busy, to make things with my hands … Mick has no choice but to go along for the ride.' In the early days, when trying to make tomato passata left the place looking like a murder scene, I felt a little like television's Margo Leadbetter, the social-climbing housewife from the BBC's 1970s sitcom The Good Life, hilariously clutching her pearls as her muddy neighbours, Tom and Barbara Good, wrestled pigs in their living room. Today, however, I am a preserving convert – and I am far from alone. The post-COVID-19 era, cost-of-living crisis, wellness trend, climate change, egg shortages and food-security concerns have conspired and inspired a new generation of everyday Australians to embrace a way of life more akin to how we lived long before supermarkets and online shopping. Inside arguably Australia's most successful community garden, St Kilda's Veg Out, a preserving and bottling shed is being built. Veg Out currently has a list of 15,000 people who engage either directly in the garden or shop at the adjacent farmers' market under the shadow of Luna Park. 'People want to preserve their harvest … the key to this garden's success is keeping people involved,' explains founder and president Rob Taylor, an actor who rallied the community and fought to save the former bowling club site from being sold off to developers. 'We got political. We got people out of the bars and cafes and into the garden, that was the only way to save the land from developers. This has been public recreational land since 1881, and we fought to keep it. Yes, there's a waiting list, and if you want a plot you have to show up and contribute to the gardens, but you don't have to wait for someone to die, you just have to earn it.' Loading While the toilet paper shortages made pandemic headlines, Aaron Whitehouse, the MD of Mr Fothergill's Seeds, noticed different items flying off the shelves. 'We had people going into shops and buying out the entire fruit and vegetable seed ranges – I'm talking seven-kilogram boxes of seed. People thought the world was ending,' says Whitehouse, whose company is one of Australia's biggest horticultural players. Post-pandemic, sales remain in double-digit annual growth and above pre-COVID levels. Whitehouse says, 'A new generation of people want to know how their food was grown, they're interested in freshness and want to take some control over their food supply.' The company recently launched an indoor hydroponic benchtop vegetable garden for apartment-dwellers, which comes with its own LED 'grow' light. ' 'Sustainability' has become such a fashionable term now, but this company has been doing exactly that for over a century,' says Fowlers' owner John Roy, who runs the North Melbourne business with his sister, Nicole. Fowlers started in 1915, when Joseph Fowler launched his eponymous preserving kit, which helped a generation survive the Great Depression. The company peaked in the 1950s and '60s but went into decline as supermarkets dominated and suburban blocks shrank. The Roy family bought Fowlers in 1993. Today, they are witnessing a renaissance. Fowlers now has its own Instagram page and celebrity ambassadors – and social media influencers – Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander have replaced Mrs B. Thrifty. In 2024, the Australia Institute and the Grow It Local urban farming movement conducted a national survey which indicated about 9 million Australians are growing some form of food, from a full-blown vegetable patch on a large block to a pot of herbs on an inner-city windowsill. Grow It Local co-founders Andrew Valder and Darryl Nichols established the enterprise over a decade ago, but the business 'got more serious around COVID', according to Bondi Beach-based Valder. Television personality Paul West, who featured in the series River Cottage Australia, joined the company, which now has 45,000 registered members. An undisclosed number of them pay a subscription fee for which they receive seeds, detailed growing information and regular tutorials. In late 2024, a crowdfunding initiative among members raised more than $500,000, which Valder says will fund further growth. 'We had all sorts of investors, from mums and dads to self-managed super funds,' Valder says. 'Some people invested $250, while I know of one who put in $50,000 … they all share our belief that growing your own food on any scale can help build healthier and more resilient communities and contribute to a more sustainable world. As our relationships with mobile phones and screens grows ever deeper … we offer an antidote for that.' In Byron Bay, beehive innovator Cedar Anderson is in total agreement: 'I think fundamentally humans yearn to farm, to produce their own food, whether that be a vegie patch in the backyard or keeping honey bees and harvesting honey.' Anderson is the co-creator of the revolutionary Flow Hive, which has transformed home beekeeping – 140,000 of the handcrafted timber units have sold globally over the past decade. With hives priced from about $1100 each, the business has ballooned into a multimillion-dollar operation, with a percentage of sales raising more than a million dollars towards bee preservation initiatives around the world, including combating the devastating Varroa mite. Loading As the national backyard chicken and fancy-breed domestic fowl population heads towards an estimated 2 million, former Wollongong builders Trevor and Dayna Tougher were inspired by Paul West's River Cottage series to quit the 'steel city' and buy a property in NSW's bucolic Southern Highlands. Today, their chicken coop business, The Poodle and the Hen, is booming. They also sell chooks for both eggs and meat. 'There has been a huge interest in chooks since COVID, especially now with all the press about egg shortages and people becoming more aware of aspects of the commercial egg and chicken production industry, specifically what they put into it,' Trevor Tougher says. Large, deluxe coops cost up to $50,000, while the more compact 'studio' range of coops for suburban homes are about $2000. Tougher has enough orders to see out the next nine months. 'Chooks are our main business now,' he says. Back in Oatley, rummaging around her underground food bunker for GW 's photographer, Maris Cummins has selected a few jars for us to sample over lunch, including a batch of her latest prized concoction: pickled red grapes. They look like plump jewels and taste sweet and juicy with a refreshing tartness.
Scottish Sun
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
‘My heart sank' – BBC legend reveals she ‘had to drink a lot of vodka' to deal with nerves of making MOTD history
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) FOOTIE commentator Jacqui Oatley has opened up about overcoming the backlash she faced when she made telly history. It's been EIGHTEEN years since Oatley became the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 3 Jacqui Oatley became the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day in 2007 Credit: Getty Images - Getty The announcement that Oatley would cover Fulham's 1-1 draw against Blackburn Rovers in the Premier League on April 21, 2007 made headline news. In an interview with The Athletic, Oatley explained how she had honed her craft while offering live commentary and reports on radio for several years before that. And the Match of the Day gig would involve an editor clipping Oatley's 90-minute commentary, recorded 'as live' at Craven Cottage. It would be cut into an eight-and-a-half-minute audio package to air over the match footage for the BBC highlights show. READ MORE IN FOOTBALL HOW RUUD! Fans shocked at what Ruud Van Nistelrooy did after Leicester relegated But Oatley recalled the "stomach-drop moment" when she realised that her history-making commentary job had received a lot of negative coverage and fan fury. The Wolves fan told The Athletic: 'My heart sank. That's when it really grew legs with the sexism element.' Three days before her big job, Oatley's radio alarm woke her up at 7am with the sound of Radio 5 Live talking about it. Presenter Rachel Burden, who Oatley 'loves to bits', was introducing vox pops from members of the public who had been asked whether Oatley should be allowed to do it. CASINO SPECIAL - BEST CASINO BONUSES FROM £10 DEPOSITS By the Friday, the day before the match, Oatley admitted to hardly having slept or eaten. The 50-year-old added: 'My only regret was that I couldn't be at my best for the most-watched game of my life. Unseen Match of the Day footage shows how pundit analysis really works as BBC boss looks to cut highlights 3 Oatley's career went from strength-to-strength as she became a leading figure in the world of sport journalism Credit: Getty 'I'd love for it all to have stopped and just gone away. But that was never an option. '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. '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.' And during the commentary itself, Oatley admitted to feeling like a bag of nerves and that she needed a strong drink afterwards. It was purely the judging of my gender. Jacqui Oatley In his post-match interview, the then-Blackburn manager, Mark Hughes, asked her how it went. She then 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. Oatley said: 'I wanted to drink a lot of vodka to make it possible to deal with the final thing.' She paced the hallway of Mitchell's flat decided her efforts 'didn't sound too horrendous. I just needed to get through it'. 3 Jacqui Oatley and Stuart Pearce presenting the FA Cup Youth Cup in 2017 Credit: Getty MOTD presenter Gary Lineker - who is leaving the flagship show after 25 years at the end of this season - introduced Oatley's segment. Lineker said: '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.' And now Kelly Cates and Gabby Logan will join Mark Chapman as part of a trio of presenters to front MOTD from next season. Oatley's career went from strength-to-strength as she became a leading figure in the world of sport journalism. She was also the UK's first female darts presenter, covering major tournaments for ITV. The BBC legend is an Ambassador for Women in Football and was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours in 2016 for services to broadcasting and diversity in sport. 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.
The Irish Sun
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
‘My heart sank' – BBC legend reveals she ‘had to drink a lot of vodka' to deal with nerves of making MOTD history
FOOTIE commentator Jacqui Oatley has opened up about overcoming the backlash she faced when she made telly history. It's been EIGHTEEN years since Oatley became the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day. 3 Jacqui Oatley became the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day in 2007 Credit: Getty Images - Getty The announcement that Oatley would cover Fulham's 1-1 draw against news . In an interview with radio for several years before that. And the Match of the Day gig would involve an editor clipping Oatley's 90-minute commentary, recorded 'as live' at Craven Cottage. It would be cut into an eight-and-a-half-minute audio package to air over the match footage for the BBC highlights show. READ MORE IN FOOTBALL But Oatley recalled the "stomach-drop moment" when she realised that her history-making commentary job had received a lot of negative coverage and fan fury. The Wolves fan told Three days before her big job, Oatley's radio alarm woke her up at 7am with the sound of Radio 5 Live talking about it. Presenter Most read in Football CASINO SPECIAL - BEST CASINO BONUSES FROM £10 DEPOSITS By the Friday, the day before the match, Oatley admitted to hardly having slept or eaten. The 50-year-old added: 'My only regret was that I couldn't be at my best for the most-watched game of my life. Unseen Match of the Day footage shows how pundit analysis really works as BBC boss looks to cut highlights 3 Oatley's career went from strength-to-strength as she became a leading figure in the world of sport journalism Credit: Getty 'I'd love for it all to have stopped and just gone away. But that was never an option. '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. '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.' And during the commentary itself, Oatley admitted to feeling like a bag of nerves and that she needed a strong drink afterwards. It was purely the judging of my gender. Jacqui Oatley In his post-match interview, the then-Blackburn manager, Mark Hughes, asked her how it went. She then 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. Oatley said: 'I wanted to drink a lot of vodka to make it possible to deal with the final thing.' She paced the hallway of Mitchell's flat decided her efforts 'didn't sound too horrendous. I just needed to get through it'. 3 Jacqui Oatley and Stuart Pearce presenting the FA Cup Youth Cup in 2017 Credit: Getty MOTD presenter Gary Lineker - who is leaving the flagship show after 25 years at the end of this season - introduced Oatley's segment. Lineker said: '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 And now Kelly Cates and Gabby Logan will join Mark Chapman as part of a trio of presenters to front MOTD from next season. Oatley's career went from strength-to-strength as she became a leading figure in the world of sport journalism. She was also the UK's first female darts presenter, covering major tournaments for ITV. The BBC legend is an Ambassador for Women in Football and was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours in 2016 for services to broadcasting and diversity in sport. 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.
