No one was more stunned than Sir Rodney Walker, the high-flying hired gun sent in to sort out Wembley, when the Football Association decided to blow the whistle last week. For I understand that he had just secured a deal with City bankers which would have provided the £400m funding required. Although they were aware of this, the FA were persuaded by their chief executive, Adam Crozier, to play a game of pre-election bluff, saying they were too impoverished to pay for it and could the Government please bail them out. It seems the FA were being economical not only with their cash.

“The fact is the FA have gone cold on the whole idea,” a Wembley insider tells me. “They could easily afford it and were virtually guaranteed the required funding, but for reasons best known to themselves they want to wash their hands of the entire project. They’ve simply chickened out.” Yet while the FA don’t want to spend a penny on even installing new toilets at Wembley, they are quite prepared to splash out plenty on the so-called “field of dreams” at Burton-on-Trent, which is to house the new national football centre. The idea of a French-style football academy is worthy, but is it necessary? One who thinks not is Keith Blunt, who for seven years was the technical director at the old school of excellence at Lilleshall. He believes Lilleshall was a success, and some of the graduates, such as Michael Owen, Sol Campbell, Nicky Barmby and Wes Brown, bear this out “The amounts being invested are incredible,” he says. “Why didn’t they buy Lilleshall and build on what had been achieved there at a fraction of the cost? It is symptomatic of sport here that we set off in one direction and end up in another.” Apparently not at Wembley.

Bates gets sidetracked Having put the kibosh on Wembley ­ it was his pie-in-the-sky masterplan which sent the projected costs spiralling through the roof in the first place ­ Ken Bates has now decided to put his boot into the proposed national athletics stadium at Picketts Lock. The fulminating whiskery one denounces suggestions that some of the London Marathon profits might be used to help with the running costs. Not that it is any of his business (he might be more concerned with the growing discontent of Chelsea fans who have to fork out for English football’s most expensive season tickets to watch an underachieving team), but he says Picketts Lock will become a white elephant and will struggle to attract crowds Athletics chiefs are indignant. “Ken Bates should let sleeping dogs lie in view of his dismal record over Wembley,” says the former Olympic medallist Alan Pascoe, who runs Fast Track, the sport’s promotional arm. “He is obviously anti-athletics, so why should anyone in the sport listen to him? Everyone knows that if you are going to have a national stadium in any sport it is going to take funding, and athletics has never directly benefited from the huge amounts of money the London Marathon has brought to all sorts of things.

If they are able to find a way of supporting the stadium it will also encourage youngsters to take part in a sport which, we should remind Mr Bates, is the most internationally successful in the country bar none, especially football.” No doubt to Bates’ chagrin, the Government announced yesterday that £8m will be provided to coach schoolkids at the new stadium Athletics shouldn’t be surprised by Bates’ blatherings. Last week he went live on radio to say Kate Hoey “should be shot” for her Wembley role on the day she flew to Northern Ireland because of the death of her father. Movie-ing the goalposts With racism in football back on the agenda (not that it was ever really off it) we are pleased to note that the sport is rallying around the novel concept of a film about Asian attitudes towards football which is being made for both TV and cinema by an enthusiastic first-time producer, Nilesh Patel. Although he describes it as a bit like a spaghetti western, it sounds more like an Asian version of The Royle Family, with three grandfathers sitting in front of a TV in the early hours watching England and Germany contest the World Cup final of 2002 in Japan. Unlikely, but Patel terms the film, to be called Half Time with Tom, Dick and Harry, which will have subtitles in Hindi, a situation comedy. The theme will highlight not only racism but age and cultural stereotyping, and has evoked interest from the Football Foundation.

Patel, a 31-year-old London architect, has drawn further support for the project from Sir Bobby Charlton, Nick Hornby and the Culture Secretary, Chris Smith. He hopes it will not only help the Kick Racism out of Football campaign, but also foster interest in the game among young Asians. Harrison’s helping hand Although he won’t be unpacking a vest when he makes his professional debut at Wembley on 19 May, Audley Harrison’s influence on the amateur game remains substantial. Perhaps it was the recollection of the charge of the fight brigade ­ the march of boxers he led on Downing Street to demand cash from the Government a year before the Sydney Olympics ­ which encouraged Sport England to display remarkable financial largesse with the recent award of £13.8m of Lottery money for the Amateur Boxing Association. This has raised a few eyebrows among other sports treated less generously in the past and seems an astonishing amount of dosh for one which, apart from Harrison, has achieved little international success and has been beset by political punch-ups. But if the cash windfall, which the persuasive Harrison helped to broker, keeps the professional promoters at bay until after the next Olympics and filters down to assist club and schools boxing, it may be well spent. Meanwhile, down in deepest Cornwall, Harrison is said to be working hard to shed the surplus poundage acquired on the celebrity circuit.