“Before every tournament there are always concerns,” Kelly Cates says as she approaches her fifth World Cup as a television and radio presenter. “There’s always something everybody’s worried about. This time I worry about the humidity and the altitude for the players and there are political concerns, obviously.
“But there are also concerns that it’s not going to feel like a World Cup. In the US, they probably see that as a good thing. They probably see it as: ‘We’re going to make it better.’ Whereas we’re looking at it from a more traditional point of view, thinking: ‘Why are you going to change something that’s so amazing in the first place?’”