I went to an all-girls convent school in Staffordshire so religious education was at the top of the priority list and PE was right down the bottom.

There was barely any extra-curricular sport at my school but from a very young age, I had an innate love and passion for sport and I’d always dread the three pips of Mrs Slater’s whistle because that meant that our PE class was over and we had to go back inside and get changed.

I could never understand the girls who’d say they had forgotten their PE kit because it was always my favourite class of the week.

My dad loved sport and my mum quite liked it, but my brother had no interest at all. My dad wasn’t massively into football though, so I only developed an interest in football when I saw a match on television one day. Instantly, I fell in love with it.

Up to that point, I’d watched loads of snooker, tennis, golf and the Olympics but as soon as I discovered football, that really took over for me. I became completely obsessed with it and I ripped all the Bros posters off my wall and replaced them with posters from Match, Shoot and 90 Minutes magazine.

I didn’t start playing myself at that point though, because there weren’t any clubs near where I lived that allowed girls to play – that’s one of the main reasons why, these days, I’m so vocal about giving girls opportunities to play football. I think it’s really important for girls to have the opportunity to try football if they want to.

I remember asking my PE teacher at my all-girls school if we could play and the answer was a straight no. So I bought myself a ball and taught myself how to do keepie-uppies but I didn’t have anyone to play properly with.

In sixth form, I transferred to a school that was predominantly boys with only a few girls in sixth form but we couldn’t play football there either. So I set up a charity match between the upper-sixth and the lower-sixth girls and the boys had to pay £1 to watch.

It was only when I went to Leeds University that I got my first real opportunity to play football and be coached – during Freshers Week, I made a beeline for the women’s football team stall and signed up and it went from there.

I joined Chiswick Ladies and played for them but when I was 25, I dislocated my kneecap during a match. Because we were just a small club playing in the Greater London League, I didn’t have access to private medical treatment or club rehab so I waited six months for an operation on the NHS and for that entire time, I was on crutches.

My reconstruction operation meant another four months on crutches and, during that time, I ended up in a job I didn’t enjoy so once I was eventually off the crutches, I thought ‘life’s too short, I want to work in sport so I’m just going to go for it’.

I was desperate to become a journalist so I enrolled in evening courses and did everything I could to learn from scratch how to become a good journalist. I gave up my job and my flat and slept on friends’ floors for a few months.

I ended up working my way up from the West Yorkshire non-league football scene. I loved every minute of that journey because even though the pay was practically non-existent when I first started, I was finally doing what I wanted to do.

In 2007, I became the first female commentator on Match of the Day. In one way, I’m really proud to have a story like that to be able to tell my kids because it will hopefully help teach them to never give up on an ambition, even if it hasn’t been done before, but it’s not something I dwell on.

There are a few negative connotations attached to those memories because it was quite a stressful time but overall, it’s a really positive thing.

One real stand-out memory for me is commentating on the World Cup in South Africa for the BBC in 2010 because my mum is South African and so I’d travelled to the country quite a few times as a kid and never in a million years did I imagine that I’d be back to commentate on the World Cup for the BBC. That was amazing.

Commentating on the World Snooker Championship was another really special moment for me because I’d watched that tournament so many times growing up and so to be walking through the corridors at the Crucible, I couldn’t quite believe it.

And commentating at Molineux was incredible because I’d been in the stands watching Wolves so many times. I’ve had a lot of moments when I’ve had to pinch myself, including presenting Euro 2016 for ITV. Next year’s World Cup in Russia will be special too.

One pretty surreal memory is when I went on a European trip with Rangers to Jerusalem. I was used to going on football trips where everyone on the flight was pretty reserved but not the Scottish journalists! They were very sociable and great fun.

Then, a bizarre thing happened – it turned out that the pilot was the lead singer of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson. I was thinking, what on earth is going on? Sure enough, it was him – he was a pilot and loved doing the football trips so would do them ad-hoc as a charter pilot. I have some really great memories of that trip.