Leading up to a live event you need to do your homework and go to bed early. Sometimes it's very tempting to go out with everybody else, They're all going to a party or going out for a nice meal and you think 'oh well I'd like to go', but sometimes you think 'no, if I'm going to be sitting in front of a camera under a light in everybody's home tomorrow I don't want big bags under my eyes and not really know what I'm talking about'.

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.

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.

I would say go for it because it is a fantastic job. It's a wonderful opportunity to go and get involved with sport at whatever level. What I would say is, if you can, go and work with your local radio station covering local sporting events.

The more you get, the better you become' and therefore over the years you become more experienced and you learn how to deal with it. You know what can go wrong, and you also learn how to react if things go wrong.

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.

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.