Kelly Cates: ‘Dealing with Roy Keane is easy – it is the quiet ones who are hard work’
After the carnage of Liverpool 7 Manchester United 0 last month, the big beasts of punditry waved their hands and raised their voices. In the red corner, Graeme Souness and Jamie Carragher, crowing. In the other red corner, Roy Keane seethed and Gary Neville said Liverpool merely “played all right, second half”.
In the middle, stillness in a storm, sat presenter Kelly Cates, who delivered a humdinger of a closing line to Sky Sports’ coverage. “They’ve beaten Manchester United 7-0, it’s a record for this fixture, Mo Salah is now Liverpool’s record Premier League goalscorer… and they didn’t even play that well.”
“If I’d thought about it I wouldn’t have done it,” Cates tells me days later, over coffee next to the Thames in west London. “I panicked after I said it, that it sounded like a joke aimed at Manchester United. It wasn’t, it was very much a joke aimed at Gary.”
Neville attempted a comeback, saying “You are live on Liverpool TV!” but was cut off by a closing montage. It fitted the mood of the evening. “The energy in the studio was all a bit giddy but Roy was doing what he always says other people should do, he was just taking his medicine.”
Cates is a familiar face for Premier League games on Sky as well as appearing once a week on the radio for 5 Live Sport. She is used to managing alpha sorts, but says the atmosphere between Sky’s pundits stays friendly even after heated on-air disagreements.
Sometimes arguments continue during the ad breaks but “I’ve never seen it get horrible,” says Cates. “It’s more laughing at one another.” There is a quality Cates has in common with all of the best sport anchors, an innate understanding that less is more. “It’s not because they’re big characters, it’s more because what value do I bring if I’m jumping in the middle? I’m only steering it.”
That sounds unusually egoless for someone making their living as a television presenter. “You have to be. You’re not the most important person in the room, you’re just moving it along a little bit and getting in and out of things, tidying everything up. They know their jobs really well, they know what they’re doing. I’m not a Pep Guardiola, micromanaging everything. I’m much more old school: just play!”
Does it make the job harder or easier when working with fiery characters? “Oh, it’s easy, it’s much easier. You want somebody who’s interesting, in the same way that the viewer wants to hear someone interesting. You don’t need to draw them out at all, that’s when I’m having to work a bit harder.”
It is clear that Cates has a sharp and whirring mind, well suited to the high-wire walk of live television. Presenting to millions almost seems like light relief. “It’s not who I am, it’s what I do, which sounds very trite, but it’s only a part of me. There’s a lot of other stuff in my life.
“There’s a part of me that has to turn it on for work, you have to separate it a little bit. You can’t go to work in a bad mood, thinking about your broken washing machine or two parents’ evenings in the same night. It’s quite nice to be able to switch off that stuff, it’s an escape for me.”
‘I have sympathy for people in a drama not of their own making’
We speak days after the minimalist Match of the Day brought about by the Gary Lineker row. Cates is equanimous on the subject, drawing out its knotty strands, but is most energised by what it meant for the rank and file BBC Sport staff.
“There’s a lot of pressure that has been put on a lot of people who are not at the sharp end. And I always have sympathy for people who find themselves in a drama not of their own making. I think a lot of people have seen it as quite a straightforward issue. And it isn’t, it’s about four or five different things which affect everybody differently.”
Staying on the subject of social media, her Liverpool/United sign-off was shared online thousands of times. Cates says she never thinks about her work in that context while it is happening. “It’s never ‘what’s Twitter going to think?’ I think that would be weird.”
Like most freelance broadcasters, she has set up her own business, called Interrupting Cow Limited. “There was a film out which my kids loved [2015’s alien animation Home] that had that in as a knock-knock joke. I thought ‘oh, that’s what I do’.”
Not an attempt to reclaim an insult? The sort she might see from Twitter dolts if she did not keep her feed aggressively filtered? “No, it was a stupid joke from a kids film.”
Interrupting Cow Ltd could have made waves in a more conventional industry had Cates finished her degree in maths and chemistry. “I got bored of studying, I was desperate to work.” That industriousness runs in her family. Her mother Marina Dalglish set up a charity after recovering from cancer, which is now run by one of Cates’s two sisters.
Brother Paul is a highly-qualified football agent and coach and father Kenny played a bit, too. “My youngest sister, Lauren, and I have a term, ‘bobbers’, people who just bob along. We’ve not really got much time for bobbers.”
