I'll have spent most of the day before the match doing some preparation. That's a little bit like studying for your exams. You need to know the personalities involved, what the stories are surrounding the game and how they've come into this game. You do a lot of preparation. I like to go in knowing more than I need.

They're [sportsmen] willing to give up a lot of other things that perhaps we all enjoy doing: eating and drinking and playing or whatever. They give up an awful lot to perform at the highest level.

I think it's something that you learn to deal with the more experienced you become. When I first presented live news, which was 12 years ago, I was very inexperienced and probably didn't deal with the pressure as well. I used to breathe very shallow when I was presenting and you could hear it in my voice and see it in my face.

You don't see what's gone before. A lot of that can be long, long boring hours in the gym, long, long hours on the track or, for the likes of Paula Radcliffe, long hours out on the road in the rain running and running.

On the day of the game you get there quite early, about 10 o'clock for a 3 o'clock kick-off, because you do a little bit of filming early on. You need to meet the crew and they need to have time to get a cup of tea and all those things the crew like to do before they go out filming.

Whether you work in news, sport, politics, whatever, it's exactly the same; a story is a story, is a story. I consider myself first and foremost a journalist.

I was in China this year and I spent three weeks there with no luggage, in a really not very nice place and without anything except my passport and my wallet. You're a long way from home and you've got no phone and you can't get in touch with anybody.