It is a bitter blow to learn that plans for a sporting village at Odsal will now not happen on the scale previously envisaged and we are yet again left with an inferior option for the stadium.

The bottom line, though, is that Odsal is nothing without the stadium and the stadium is not, at present, up to scratch.

That being the case, there is a real danger of Bradford Bulls, one of the city and district’s most prestigious sports teams, having to move away from their spiritual home in order to retain their Super League status because the ground is simply not good enough for the modern era.

So while the other major facility in the area, the Richard Dunn leisure centre, desperately needs refurbishing or replacing, for now the stadium must be the focus of attention if the district is to retain top level sport in that location.

The loss of education funding for the project is a bitter pill to swallow but is understandable in the present economic climate.

Given the size and location of the site, it almost beggars belief that there are no private sector partners interested in developing this project when the recession ends.

Rather than fudging the issue with scaled-down plans, perhaps the Council needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new scheme that provides the commercial opportunities that would allow private business to invest as it has in similar schemes elsewhere.