Fast Track: A dedicated follower of football - CV Clare Tomlinson, Sky TV Sports Presenter

I WENT over to work for Sky after working in a variety of different PR jobs in football. One of the things which at first put me off was that I had not had a burning ambition to be on TV since I was two years old. I thought that all the people who were there would be like that, but I found that's not the case.

Because a lot of presenters at this new station were taken on at the same time, we have all been very supportive of one another. There's been none of the famous backbiting that you hear about inside TV. So I would advise people not to rule out doing something new just because you haven't always wanted to do it.

I really did not know what I wanted to do when I was at school, but I thought that I would like to work in the media in some way. I grew up in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and knew that I wanted to go to university in order to leave, because it was a pretty normal market town. I did history at Leeds University because it was the only thing I could really consider doing. I was not really that academic, and to do history you just needed a good short-term memory and an impressive essay style.

My friends and I had not given much thought to what we were going to do after college, but then we got a bit worried when other people started getting signed up for jobs. I tried the idea of advertising but, after going to a few interviews, decided it wasn't for me. Everybody seemed to be quite pretentious and didn't look as if they were having a good time.

I had done a few stints of work experience with local papers in Lincoln and the Nottinghamshire Evening Post. It was great fun, but I soon realised I did not want to be a print journalist working to deadlines. I got a 2.1 from university and the next thing to do was move to London. It meant I could be close to Spurs, whom I had supported since I was 10, even though my whole family were Leicester City fans.

My first job was in fact at Tottenham, although it was just temporary. It was just after the 1990 Cup and there was a fantastic explosion of interest in the game. I had written to every club in London, not really asking for jobs, but just to go in and spend some time in their PR offices. Spurs was one of the only clubs to write back, and I spent a great six weeks there.

I basically helped out with the programme and did a few interviews with first-team players. There was no chance of a job there because it was when Spurs were around pounds 21m in debt. After leaving there, I worked for Max Clifford as his general dogsbody; there was only him and me and I did everything from making the tea to helping with deals.

He was interested in getting more into sport, but I stayed there for only six months. At the time we represented people such as Pat Cash, and we did Live Aid and Rock Aid Armenia. You can only learn from Max; it was a good laugh, but it was not really my world and I wanted to get back into sport. I then moved on to work for a charity, Football Against MS, and stayed there for eight months. Then I went to work for the Football Trust, around the time when it was implementing the results of the Taylor Report, giving grants to clubs towards improving their grounds.

That was brilliant, because it taught me about newspapers. We were fighting to get stuff into them - rather than later, at Arsenal, where you were battling to keep things out. I met a lot of people in football, which I think is a small world where everybody seems to know everybody else.

Then, when David Davies went to the FA to set up a new media department, I went with him as a press officer. My first year there was incredible because we seemed to have a big story happening every week. We had huge stories involving Paul Merson, George Graham, the Tottenham bung scandal, Eric Cantona, and England fans rioting in Dublin.

Then the directors at Arsenal approached the FA to see whether I would be interested in going to work in the Arsenal press office. It was a great challenge because Arsene Wenger was coming in as a foreign manager and the press officer was very much needed. I suppose people may say I was going over behind enemy lines. But there comes a point when you've got to decide, as a football fan, whether it's your hobby or your life. They always used to take the mick out of me in the office, especially on Derby days, but it wasn't really a problem, and you've just got to be professional.

The Sky job seemed to come out of the blue. They had decided to launch a 24-hour sports news programme and Sky rang me up to ask whether I was interested. I had never considered going in front of the cameras before, but went along to do a screen test. I thought: "What the hell", I would do the test and might be hopeless, but then I would know. I really enjoyed it and now absolutely love the job. I'm paid to read football in newspapers and watch TV - that's not exactly a terrible way to spend your day.