HIGH on the list of candidates for headlines you thought you'd never see was an offering on Wednesday which read: "Wembley way ahead of schedule."

This is a bit rich considering that it took three years between playing the final match in the old stadium and starting to knock it down.

However, at some kind of fancy launch on Tuesday, designed to sell luxury packages in the £757m, 90,000 capacity stadium, it was claimed that it could be ready well before the 2006 FA Cup final.

That means about the same time to build it as it took to move the bulldozers in, but surely there will be another hitch somewhere along the line.

If they need yet more money they won't be able to go back to Sport England because they stumped up £120m of National Lottery cash on condition that Wembley would also house athletics and be part of a London 2012 Olympic bid.

Which brings me on to that other protracted farce, which was resolved yesterday. Energised by the Baghdad bounce, Mr Blair has ordained that we will bid for the Olympics, and while the appalling Ken Livingstone spoke at the launch we should be grateful that sports minister Richard Caborn did not.

Caborn recently bolstered his reputation for sporting ignorance when asked by a television presenter about the prospect of a snooker academy in Sheffield. He replied: "Snooker is synonymous with Sheffield like Wembley is synonymous with tennis."

Whatever Wembley is synonymous with, it is not athletics, and its chances of helping to justify its huge cost by playing a part in the Olympic bid appear to have been scuppered by a determination to regenerate parts of the East End. Who will have wanted that? Mr Livingstone, I presume.

EVEN Mr Caborn might know what Lord's is synonymous with. A game for flannelled fools, he would probably call it, although the slob who quit Lord's for the jungle and emerged as the nation's favourite celebrity is clearly no fool.

Phil Tufnell has done more than anyone in the last ten years to raise cricket's profile, according to ECB chief Mike Soper. The same man is probably salivating at the prospect of marketing loads of Tufnell masks to be worn by lager louts at cricket's new slogathon this summer.

The Twenty20 Cup is designed to attract a new audience and suddenly Tufnell is the ideal man to encourage all his new admirers to rush along and sample the excitement. Come to think of it, he should have been at the Olympic launch as well.

THANK goodness Newcastle Falcons' great escape allowed them to avoid the worst aspects of the unseemly goings-on in rugby's higher echelons last weekend.

True, it was their defeat at Bath which allowed the former giants to escape relegation, but there was no suggestion that the Falcons had not put up a fight.

The powers-that-be want a North-East club in the Premiership, so the chances are that, as with Bath, if Newcastle had gone down an excuse would have been found not to promote Rotherham.

With Gloucester and Bath flying the flag for the South West, Bristol are expendable. But as things stand they will not have the chance of automatic promotion because next season there is to be a play-off.

This constant changing of the goalposts is ludicrous. Promotion and relegation is an essential part of sport, as the fascination with this season's five-club scrap to avoid the drop has proved.

Newcastle boss Rob Andrew maintains that compared with Division One of the Football League there is no life outside the Zurich Premiership.

Try telling that to Sunderland chairman Bob Murray, although I don't imagine his club's plight encouraged the rest of the Premiership to suggest they didn't deserve to go down after developing such wonderful facilities.

Even had they gained twice as many points, Sunderland would have been four points adrift of safety and their manager was right to describe them as "hopeless" after their final day performance. He faces an enormous task to turn things round, and the groundsman will have to keep the turf watered now that King Spit, Kevin Phillips, is departing.

THE Australians are pretty good at losing the final match of a Test series after winning all the others, prompting wild celebrations among their opponents' supporters.

But at least, unlike us, the West Indies had another excuse for their euphoria as they had created a world record for the biggest fourth innings total to win a Test.

Let's hope Brian Lara was sincere when he said it gave him more pleasure than his two record-breaking innings because the Windies' revival is still in its infancy and they need the full commitment of a man who remains a batting genius when he's in the mood.