The Media Eye - Gabby Logan

By Simon Wright - Follow me on Twitter @Siwri88

The presentation of football on television has continued to evolve over the years, and although it has been a male dominated world, females are now rightly making their mark.  One of these pioneers is Gabby Logan.

Gabby has worked for every major broadcaster in the UK, and is a fantastic all-round sports presenter, with football among her main loves.  She has moved away from football to take a bigger role with BBC Sport in other areas such as athletics and rugby, but as she said a few years ago – she was the first female presenter of a live football match on terrestrial television and no-one can take that away from her.

Her career has seen the highs of making the breakthrough with Sky Sports in the 1990s, when she was still known as Gabby Yorath, before marrying Scottish rugby player Kenny in 2001.  There was her rise to fame with ITV, before being given the boot harshly in 2006, but it seems like the 40-year-old has found her natural home with the BBC.

Born to former Welsh international footballer and manager Terry Yorath, Gabby (pictured) represented Wales at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, finishing eighth in the rhythmic gymnastics competition.  However she had to retire from competing in gymnastics aged just 17 due to sciatica in her back.  Undeterred from this disappointment, she went to University and made her name reading the news and co-presenting the breakfast programme for radio station Metro Radio in Newcastle.

She joined Sky Sports in 1996, and helped out with the launch of the corporation’s third channel.  Gabby fronted live sports for the first time, such as ice hockey and basketball, but it was football where she wanted to be.  A Newcastle United fan, she has spoken openly in recent years about the horrific fire at Valley Parade on 11 May 1985 that took the lives of 56 people.  Gabby’s father was playing for Bradford on the day and she watching in the stands with her brother and sister.  They had left her positions just moments before the fire began, but witnessed the disaster at first-hand.  It is a day she has never forgotten.

In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year, she said the late Helen Rollason was among her early inspirations.  She said: “Many careers are shaped by an individual or a mentor, and my sports journalism career was no different.  I grew up watching Grandstand on the BBC and thought Des Lynam was brilliant.  I was also inspired by Helen Rollason, particularly because female sports journalists and presenters were such a rarity back then.”

In 1998 Gabby was ready to move on to another challenge.  As recently as July, she spoke out about Sky’s inequality when she was there and hinted looks were more important than presentation talent.

In an interview, she spoke out: “The girls are basically wearing a leotard while the bloke’s in a suit and a tie.  It’s fine if they’re given a career path but there have never been any big breakthrough women on Sky.  We all have to go to other places.”

When Brian Barwick was head of sport at ITV, he persuaded her to leave Sky and join ITV in 1998, an offer that she wasted no time in accepting.  Gabby would front the ITV football magazine show On The Ball, shown on Saturday lunchtimes in a head-to-head battle with the BBC’s flagship show Football Focus.

She was understudy to Des Lynam, but worked on two World Cups, two European Championships and the 2003 Rugby World Cup.  When Lynam elected to retire from live duties after Euro 2004, Logan was given the main role of hosting ITV’s live midweek Champions League matches.

She was in Istanbul in 2005 to front coverage of Liverpool’s historic fightback in the final against AC Milan, and in Paris a year later where Arsenal came close to upsetting Barcelona before succumbing to a 2-1 defeat.  Sadly, this was where her ITV career started to unravel.

The 2006 World Cup was arriving, and ITV had a choice of using Logan or Jim Rosenthal as the main host.  Rosenthal had quit his role as anchor of the channel’s Formula One coverage to do more football and boxing, but the new ITV boss had other ideas.  Mark Sharman opted for Steve Rider, who arrived from the BBC in late 2005 to become the new F1 host.  However, Sharman decided that he was the professional they were looking for to fight against the BBC, a real slap in the face for Logan and Rosenthal.

Ironically, it was Sharman who had taken Gabby to Sky in 1996 but now, he saw a different direction and there was no place for her in their World Cup coverage.  Logan admitted later: “I interviewed David Beckham but I didn’t see a single game.  It dented my confidence and made me question my abilities.  If you’ve got ambition and you want to do well, it’s obviously disappointing.”

Midway through the finals in Germany, ITV elected to terminate Logan’s contract and it left a bitter taste in her mouth, even though the corporation’s website continued to say for months afterwards that she would front the channel’s UEFA Cup coverage.

In his motorsport book My Chequered Career which was published last year, Rider admitted he felt sorry for the way the bosses had treated Gabby.  He wrote: “My problems, however, were nothing compared to Gabby’s.  She had been treated desperately badly.  To diminish her role for so long and then get rid of her in the middle of a World Cup was insulting and insensitive.  I am delighted that she was immediately picked up by the BBC, who gave her the proper opportunity to demonstrate what a fine broadcaster she is.”

Logan’s move to the BBC was officially confirmed in December 2006, and her first port of duty was to present a live FA Cup fourth round tie between Luton Town and Blackburn Rovers in January 2007.  She also would host a sports programme called Inside Sport that ran for three years.

When Ray Stubbs left the BBC for ESPN in 2009, Logan was chosen to be the new face of Saturday afternoons with the corporation’s successful results service Final Score.  Her approach to the show was light-hearted and far more professional than the Sky equivalent Soccer Saturday, whose pundits squeal and shout at almost every goal that goes in on a Saturday afternoon.  This approach is fun to start with, but can get a bit irritating after a while.

With Gabby living in London with her husband and two children, the BBC’s relocation to MediaCity in Salford wasn’t the best news for herself.  In May 2013, she decided to leave her role as Final Score host due to travelling commitments and has been replaced for the new season by Jason Mohammed.  However Gabby will still present live rugby union, and has taken a bigger role in athletics following her success of fronting Olympics Tonight last summer in London.  She is currently in Moscow for the IAAF World Athletics Championships which started on Saturday morning.  Gabby will also likely fill in on Match of the Day when main presenter Gary Lineker is hosting other programmes.

It isn’t just sport that keeps Lady Logan ticking over.  She has previously hosted The Vault for ITV, her own radio show on BBC Radio Five Live and Live with Gabby on Channel Five for seven months in 2011.  She also has featured in Strictly Come Dancing, is a frequent guest on the Channel 4 satirical show 8 Out of 10 Cats and returned to ITV at the start of 2013 for the first time since her acrimonious departure seven years earlier to co-host the diving show Splash, which turned out to be a surprising hit.

Although football fans won’t see much of Gabby Logan on our screens in the forthcoming season, she has shown that there is a female market in sports journalism.  Her versatility and all-round knowledge make her a big and vital part of the BBC team and it seems like she has found her natural home. She is a top broadcaster and we are bound to see more of her in the future.