"It is different," said Premier Daniel Andrews, as he stood in Ballarat's Mars Stadium in April. "It's a bit riskier than just running it in the middle of a large city. But to do this and to do it well, and we will, [it's] an opportunity like no other."

In the usual way of landmark announcements, the tenor of the revelation regional Victoria would play host to the 2026 Commonwealth Games was one of tantalising possibility and potential.

Much was made of the incomparable opportunity to leverage the games to expedite or attract additional state government investment into regional centres, as well as the economic benefit the games, by rights, could or would inevitably afford.

In the weeks that followed, City of Ballarat chief executive Evan King echoed this sentiment by emphasising the once-in-a-generation potential carried by the games, which he declared were "far more than a sporting event".

"[It] will deliver legacy sporting infrastructure," he told a gathering of the city's most prominent leaders. "It will clearly deliver transport infrastructure; it is going to deliver housing infrastructure for us [and] it will deliver visitor economy opportunities."

Three months on, as we come to grips with terms such as 'legacy infrastructure' and the wider lingua franca of major sports management, all eyes remain firmly trained on Birmingham, as it opens the Commonwealth Games 2022.

In just 12 days' time, however, those games - whatever their enduring impact - will be at an end, and the focus will inexorably shift to regional Victoria, which notably has around half as much time to prepare for the games than host cities of times past.

That much owes to the fact that the Victorian government was the only city across the more than 50 nations comprising the Commonwealth to make a bid for host-city status.

And, remarkably, that bid itself only materialised at the behest of a desperate approach from the Commonwealth Games Federation, which, at the time, was at risk of drowning in the ignominy of failing to secure a willing host for the 2026 games.

On any view, the compressed timeframe within which the state has to deliver the games leaves little in the way of scope for delay or inertia so far as critical decision-making is concerned.

Added to this, as conceded by Mr Andrews in April, the risks attached to the delivery of the games via four regional centres - Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong and Gippsland - considerably outweigh those which ordinarily accompany the usual delivery of the games through a major metropolitan city.

"The reality is that it is [local] councils which will play a major role in the delivery of the '26 games," said City of Ballarat mayor Daniel Moloney this week, citing the unique format of the 2026 games.

"As council, we're really excited about the opportunities," he went on to say, "but we also know that there's going to be a huge amount of work that will ultimately fall to each of the four key councils and given the tight timeline for the games, there will definitely need to be local intel."

"What's unclear, though, is exactly what needs to be delivered from a council point of view, and that's because the key infrastructure decisions [by state government] haven't been made yet."

So much is true; though the Victorian government has - to date - committed $2.6 billion for the games in the 2022/23 budget, nothing beyond the initial announcement of four athletes' villages and "modern sports infrastructure" has been disclosed regarding the particulars of that expenditure.

Most of those funds, moreover, the state government has said, will only be spent in 2025 and 2026; a state of affairs which hangs a conspicuous question mark over the capacity of all four regional centres to successfully execute the games come March 2026.

Perhaps with a view to dispelling or capitalising on this growing sense of unease or confusion, the City of Ballarat recently released a five-page advocacy document, specifying the perceived infrastructure requirements of the city as it prepares to host its allocated events, which include athletics, T20 cricket, boxing and may expand to rowing and the marathon.

Headlining this wish-list is a third potential train station somewhere within the vicinity of Mars Stadium, the duplication of Creswick Road - to create a "grand entrance" at the city's northern gateway, airport and bus network upgrades and, of course, an athletes' village in the form of mixed-housing.

There are, however, no plans currently afoot to internally restructure the organisation with a view to dedicating additional human resources to the planning stage of the games.

"I have fairly extensive personal knowledge myself already," Mr King told this masthead, adding that the city had not sent any delegation to Birmingham. "I have many, many friends that will be over there [Birmingham], and I'm obviously also working very closely with the state government that is sending a delegation there."

"I've also recently met up with the Gold Coast City Council to talk to them about learnings from when the Commonwealth Games were there."

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Though, like Ballarat, none of the other three councils have sent a delegation to Birmingham, two - Bendigo and Geelong - are conversely funding internal director- or senior-level appointments to expressly oversee planning and delivery of the games. Latrobe City Council, similarly, is evaluating the resources it will require to successfully support the event.

The Courier understands the City of Ballarat will not follow this lead, leaving responsibility for this critical advocacy and planning phase to the "executive leadership team" as a whole; all of which may or may not, depending on your view, hamper the ability of the city to successfully leverage the infrastructure funding it requires to deliver the games to the requisite standard.

Speaking in Ballarat last week, Mr Andrews told reporters that though he had no news for Ballarat with respect to the games, the organising committee he chairs "meets often" and that there was "much work going on".

"You can be assured, from a planning point of view, that we will not allow anything to get in the way of delivering an environmentally sustainable, successful, thoughtful [games]," he said. "We will make good planning decisions in good time."

With the countdown on for the 2026 games and the expectation that the investment will leave infrastructure that benefits regional cities long after the 2026 fortnight-event, the lessons from Birmingham and decisions to come will make compelling reading.