OCTOBER is here again and that can only mean one thing — a major Worcester City announcement.

During this month in each of the past three years a key marker has been placed in the never-ending story of the proposed new stadium at Nunnery Way.

The annual revelations have got increasingly more gloomy and now we find ourselves at the juncture of today’s front page revelations that a new ground at the site would bankrupt the club.

Following weeks of negotiations with St Modwen, the City directors want out from the contract they were lumbered with by the regime of much-maligned former chairman Dave Boddy.

It is up to the current board’s legal team to decide whether that is possible but putting their concerns in the public domain, and risking the wrath of St Modwen, is the last throw of the dice.

City are desperate.

Chairman Anthony Hampson and his colleagues have exhausted their options and realise a clean break is the only way forward.

Yet, it was once very different.

Cast your minds back to October 2007, just six months after St Modwen had bought the 20 acres of land between junctions six and seven of the M5 for £3.15million.

A picture of Boddy at the gate of the site adorned the front of this newspaper under the headline ‘Field of Dreams’.

However, it has proved to be exactly that, a dream, or to be more realistic a nightmare.

I fully appreciate I was among those singing the Nunnery Way praises.

Back then, the vision was an all-singing and dancing £8m stadium with a 6,000 capacity and conference facilities.

It was to be City’s passport to the Football League.

It was another year before designs for a three-stage development were put to the public at the Whitehouse Hotel.

Despite all Boddy’s enthusiasm, many were not convinced and, perhaps prophetically, one fan said: “I can’t see them having enough money for the first phase of the project, never mind the second or the third”.

Then, as was once a trademark of City’s communications surrounding the issue, everything went quiet. For a long time.

Fast forward 12 months and nothing much else had happened.

But that all changed when a letter from leading Worcester City Council planner Alan Coleman heavily criticised the proposals. In it, plans were deemed ‘wholly unacceptable in respect of detail and viability’ — a damning verdict if ever there was one.

City had already stated their intention to scale the project back to £2m but those amendments needed to be made to the existing planning application at the Guildhall.

That still hasn’t happened.

Which brings us to today’s fourth instalment of October announcements.

The reason the new designs remain in a drawer at St Modwen is because City cannot afford to build a new ground. Talks between the parties have broken down over the £1.5m funding chasm and the City board have admitted the club does not have a future if they continue along this path.

Plans could be submitted tomorrow but there is no point as building would bankrupt City and St Modwen need the stadium as a catalyst for their retail park.

The battle lines have been drawn but let’s hope there is some better news before next October because by then City will have little more than 18 months to vacate their St George’s Lane home in the summer of 2013.