£750 million is quite a lot of money. In fact, it’s more than that. For the non-fiscally-minded amongst you, allow me to contextualise this figure: it equates to four Windsor Castles, is 50 percent greater than the Gross National Product of Monaco and would take England captain John Terry 96 years to earn on his £150,000 a week salary.

With this in mind, I find it difficult to imagine how a consortium comprising the combined forces of the government, the FA, Sport England, the National Lottery and a lorry-load of private investors has been able to spend this monumental amount of money rebuilding Wembley Stadium, yet failed to deliver on its most fundamental aspect.

Anyone who watched either of last week’s FA Cup semi-finals will agree that the state of the pitch at England’s national stadium was horrendous – I don’t quite mean SPL horrendous, though the pace that it forced the games to be played at might well make you think otherwise. Lumps, bumps and divots abounded as Chelsea took on Arsenal on semi-final Saturday and things looked even worse when Everton and Man United were forced to grind out one of the most painfully slow and uninspirational matches in the history of the competition the following afternoon.

In the wake of aggressive attacks on the stadium’s surface from top Premier League managers David Moyes, Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, the FA has pledged to re-lay the pitch for a sixth time since the new “home of football” was completed in 2007. As such, plans have been made to dig up the Wembley surface in time for the all-important clash of the titans that is the FA Trophy final between Stevenage and York on 9 May – either that or the Football Association executives are keen to avoid the humiliation of having their shoddy, war-torn pitch beamed to millions across the globe when England take on Andorra the following month, but the jury’s still out on that one.

What’s more, in an absolutely fascinating account of their decision to replace the existing “fibre-rye grass” turf with a new “sand-soil” alternative, equipped with a sophisticated hydroponic growth-enhancement system, the FA believes that the new surface will be able to cope better with the strenuous nature of football, as well as the various other events that take place at Wembley, including speedway, American football and numerous rock and pop concerts.

But it is precisely here that I believe the FA, despite all their hifalutin' knowledge of horticultural practice, has failed to recognise a fundamental flaw in their thinking: the substance they are talking about here is grass. Yes, grass. If the Football Association insists on prostituting their glorious national stadium to anyone from the New England Patriots to AC/DC, then it really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the surface of the pitch has sustained such crippling damage over the last two years, and I must admit I doubt that an alternative method of seed-scattering is going to do much to change the outcome.

To illustrate my point, if you take a fruit pastel and drop a grand piano on top of it, it’s going to get squashed; it doesn’t matter if it’s a Tesco value fruit pastel or one of Rowntree’s finest. Likewise, you can talk till you’re blue in the face about sand-soil grass, rye grass or even elephant grass for that matter; the fact is that as soon as you unleash two bawdy NFL teams onto a football pitch, or have it crushed to death under the weight of 50,000 metal-heads, you’re hardly going to be stepping out onto the set of Ground Force the following day.

Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that the FA restrict the use of the Wembley pitch to football matches exclusively, as multi-million pound stadiums clearly don’t pay for themselves, but they could at least plan their events calendar a little more carefully. Anyone who remembers England’s woeful performance that saw them fail to qualify for Euro 2008 in a home match to Croatia last year will remember the sate of the pitch that day – possibly the worst in Wembley’s history. Why? Because the stadium had hosted an NFL exhibition match just two weeks earlier. Again, like the fruit pastel/piano scenario, it’s not rocket science; though apparently the art of how to piece together a half-decent timetable was not part of the pre-GCSE curriculum at the time when the current staff of National Stadium Limited were at school.

What becomes of turf at London’s 90,000 seater arena remains to be seen; probably not during the FA Trophy final, because I doubt anyone will be watching it, but come July when the Three Lions take to the field against Andorra, we’ll see if miracles on the Wembley pitch really are possible – and I don’t just mean a win for England.