ESPNSTAR.com columnist Jesse Fink puts Qatar 2022 under the microscope - and does not like what he sees.

Hassan Al-Thawadi is an impressive man. Qatar 2022 could scarcely have a better spokesman or frontman. It's why they chose him to deliver that memorable sales pitch to FIFA's executive committee last year that won it the World Cup.

It's why the influential football journal World Football Insider nominated him as one of "an outstanding generation of emergent football leaders".

It's why, when the dust has settled on Asian football's current political turmoil, he could conceivably be cast as a future leader for the continent on the world stage.

But his comments at an afternoon session of the Leaders in Football conference in London have done little to silence the doubters when it comes to what appears to be the increasingly harebrained idea of hosting a World Cup in an Arabian summer.

UEFA president and the man most likely to succeed Sepp Blatter in FIFA's top job, Michel Platini, has reiterated his desire to move the Cup from July to November/December 2022, just prior to the Winter Olympics. Blatter himself is currently opposed to the idea but will flip-flop wherever the political wind blows.

However it's Platini's opinion that carries the most import. Come 2015 he will, bar catastrophe, be FIFA's ninth president in 111 years. Under his purview, FIFA has the power to take the World Cup away from the Middle East if it can't deliver on its promises.

Al-Thawadi may well contend the Qatari bid was conducted "to the highest ethical and moral standards" and they "worked very hard on delivering the messages" to rebut the Chinese whispers about what really went on prior to the December 2 vote in Zurich.

Yet the elephant in the room is still there, stamping its feet and looking more and more immovable with each passing day.

All the allegations of bribery and impropriety aside, how the hell is this grand folly going to work?

Al-Thawadi has banged his fists and loudly declared there's no proof of nefarious goings-on at Qatar 2022 HQ.

But where's the proof that the carbon-neutral, air-conditioned, 40,000-capacity-plus stadia that will be playing host to 32 teams and hundreds of thousands of officials, media, sponsors fans come 2022 are actually going to stay cool?

To date there isn't one shred of incontrovertible evidence that the test demonstrations that were done on an empty 500-seater stadium with a six-a-side football pitch can be replicated successfully in an arena filled with 87,000 people, the capacity of the Lusail Iconic Stadium that will host the final, and on a full-sized football pitch. It's all theory and blind hope.

The first of nine new stadiums to be built for the World Cup will be opened in 2015, four years away.

The Al-Sadd Stadium, which is being cooled this week to convince visiting inspectors of the IAAF's Evaluation Commission that Qatar is ready to host the 2017 World Athletics Championships, only seats 15,000.

So when Platini says "this sporting occasion is the most important in the world" and there are serious concerns about the health and welfare of players, it behoves the Qataris to put more forward than fancy computer graphics, a clutch of stadium designs and the vague assurances of architects and engineers.

In July, Michael Beaven, a director of Arup Associates, the company that built the test stadium, was censured by the Qataris for suggesting a plan to break matches into three 30-minute thirds was under consideration.

Something that doesn't exactly inspire confidence. And, short of taking the Cup away from Qatar altogether and giving it to the Americans, that's what the world wants. It's what Platini wants.

And it's what Al-Thawadi, for all his political smarts and polished manner, has so far failed to deliver.