The Albion won't have enough money to develop Falmer. This was revealed on Saturday's radio phone-in.

It didn't come from the club's finance director, or even from the lady who tidies up the Queen's Road offices, but from a chap who just happened to ring in.

He doesn't - he can't - have a clue whether it is true or not but it obviously gave him a nice warm feeling to dream up a theory that contradicts all the evidence and then to present it on the wireless.

There must have been at least three listeners who believed him. The first of these could have been a pensioner living in the High Weald who wasn't really concentrating but did hear the statement before the Hoover drowned out the radio. The second would have been the man himself and the third would have been Tom Carr, honorary communications director of Sink The Stadium (Falmer) plc.

Along with his fellow board members, Mr Carr is a fellow of indefatigable and admirable energy; a chap who can conjure facts out of thin air at a moment's notice. He rarely stoops to humbly presenting personal opinions, preferring to carve categoric statements in tablets of stone which he lobs in the general direction of passers-by. Like the man who once assured a public meeting that local residents would die if the Albion played at Withdean Stadium, Mr Carr breathes absolute certainty.

Not so long ago he said that the building of the stadium would be the worst-ever disaster to befall Falmer - worse, presumably, than the bellowing trunk road that drives through the village's very heart.

In fairness, he is not alone in this view - a couple of weeks ago a Falmer campaigner complained that the village, whose relationship with the A27 is similar to that between Clackett Lane Services and the M25, would be greatly disturbed by cheers from the new stadium.

The trouble is, if it is easy to come up with extraordinary opinions dressed up as facts, it is also easy to persuade people to believe them.

Partly this is due to what has been described as the Arthur Scargill School of Propaganda, which says that if you shout something loudly often enough, some people will eventually believe you. And partly it is due to the fact that many people just love to be presented with pre-cooked points of view that they can pick up and run with.

It was Jeremy Clarkson who pointed out that if 80 per cent of people hate the Euro and 18 per cent love it then that simply proves that only two per cent of the people are clever enough not to have an opinion at all.

I doubt that there are many readers of this column - and certainly not one writer of it - who can claim to have no opinion about Falmer. We have points of view, but they are not absolute. For three years the needles on our dials flickered as we listened to the arguments. The depressing thing for the board of Sink the Stadium plc is that it is now doing a better PR job for the Albion's dreams than Dick Knight could ever manage.

The only danger, as politicians with 30 point opinion poll leads always say the night before a general election, is complacency. Last week, one of the Stadium petition gatherers standing near Asda wearing a blue and white scarf and an Albion-badged jacket and carrying a bundle of stadium information packs was asked more than once whether he was for the stadium or against.

If all we had to do to keep Bobby Z was get a signed petition then we would surely get 50,000 names. But Falmer is worth 100 Zamoras. We owe it to all those Goldstone Ghosts and in a way to the Goldstone itself. Its spirit deserves a resting place.