Seconds out and a bit of quiet down the back please. The aldermen of the FAI get back into the circle tonight, two great sumos of differing opinion trying to push the other out. All the indications are the critical mass is with the naysayers and that No Income Park will never get built. The question tonight is how long the business will run. Nobody leaves the circle tonight.

Why?

Well. Ta-da! A new business plan will be unveiled this evening. Personally I'm looking forward to that like a kid queueing for the new Harry Potter. The old business plan made Harry Potter look like an academic text, so sprinkled with magical touches was it.

Prime Time last week did us all a favour by getting somebody with a qualification to have a look at the document. Lay folk like you and I just have an instinct for this sort of thing. The thought of the FAI building a big stadium with a roof on it out in the middle of nowhere didn't seem to sit right. Yet Bernard O'Byrne had his figures, and his passion. Maybe everything we knew was wrong. Well, the Wharton Consulting report was remarkable in its measured damnation.

Just imagine going into your bank manager and proposing the following:

You'd like to build a nice, 45,000-seat stadium with a slidey roof and you can guarantee to put 11 football events in it per annum. You think nine of these will fill the place, but currently attendances at the smaller ground with the entire city centre as its catchment and cheaper tickets are often well below capacity. For example, you sold 20,000 tickets at an average of £18 each for the recent friendly against Finland. In your new, more remote establishment you need to sell 43,000 tickets at £29 each. Anyway, fingers crossed on that one.

To make up the money, you hope to have big tennis matches, big boxing bouts, show jumping, Disney on ice. You name it. All sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with your core business. Nobody has guaranteed these things to you, but hey, build it and they will come. Won't they?

Your projections appear to have doublecounted certain revenues. Income from corporate packages is added to income from corporate tickets. Doh!

Your business plan contains no analysis on the success or otherwise of comparable ventures and performs no analysis of risk or benefit in exploring other available options.

There are other things that your bank manager might ask about. Your organisation has an annual trading surplus of £1.5 million, but you propose a capital expenditure with a £30 million funding gap; some of the revenues involved are, in fact, loans from yourself; your financial projections run for 15 years but don't allow for wage inflation or the impact of competition; and, while the idea of attracting big UEFA events is exciting, the projected cost of the fit-out of the stadium doesn't seem likely to meet UEFA standards. Oh, and staff costs don't appear to include PAYE or national insurance. And a head groundsman for £13,000? What is he, a goat?

That's just a sample of the problems raised. You wouldn't be given cash for a kitchen extension on that basis. Yet that business plan has survived largely in tact. When the new business plan is unveiled tonight there are great leaps of credibility which must be made.

We know already that the cost of No Income Park has leapt way beyond original projections, and even now the project is a long way from starting and faces a tough battle to overcome the objections of the Department of Defence.

In a speech to the FAI Council last November, treasurer Brendan Menton suggested he thought the cost would come in at about £130 million, which seems a reasonable estimate. This would necessitate debt of £70 million. Which doesn't seem reasonable.

Menton pointed out many other things which would set alarm bells ringing even if you were running a fruit and veg stall. The FAI have spent £3.3 million of the £3.8 million reserves they had accumulated at March 1999. These sums had been spent against the background of exaggerated claims as to the amount of revenue coming in from seat and box sales. It's not a crisis yet, but keep watching.

So the FAI gets together tonight as a deeply divided association. Not a lot of trust, and not a whole lot of money either. The new business plan will probably buy another few weeks for the No Income Park project as people take their time studying its ramifications. It is difficult to see how the gaps between happy aspiration and reality can be bridged, however.

Under the original plan the stadium is supposed to be completed by late this year. Even with all going well it won't be started by then. Allowing for inflation and currency variation and additional costs incurred since the plan was floated in 1998, there seems to be no way in which the FAI can avoid either ending up with a substandard stadium or (and) a debt which would drag the association under.

This will all be music to certain ears down in Government Buildings. Silly boys. While the No Income Park saga has been played out, the BertieBowl has been given a free ride, which is a pity. There are problems with the location, the infrastructural arrangements, the grandiose scale and the traffic arteries which the BertieBowl backers have yet to answer to.

Bored, narky and blue in the face with harping on about the thing, this column once again calls for a more rational, more modest national stadium to be built as part of a larger urban regeneration project near the city centre. It's not about who's got the biggest one or the best one anymore, it's about what we need, what we can afford and what can give the most benefit to the most citizens.