The viewing figures for games shown live on RTE over the last few months have finally proven that there is a market out there for the game but so far the only identified, it seems, is people who want to tune in on television rather than actually go to the matches.

Up and down the country, clubs have continued their struggle to get people through the turnstiles with, on the face of it, limited enough success. Good cup runs by Finn Harps and Cork City were rewarded with significantly improved crowds but elsewhere attendances remain low, with little immediate sign of taking a turn for the better.

Friday night in Dalymount Park was especially disappointing. A Dublin derby between one club chasing the league title and another trying to get into Europe was watched by what was, in the circumstances, a terribly poor crowd.

Of those who did show up, a good proportion were following the visitors but not the sort of numbers you would expect to travel a couple of miles to see a club in their position. Likewise the size of Shelbourne's home crowds has been static for some time now, with the club reaching the stage where they were filling the main stand in Tolka Park relatively quickly after they moved to the stadium but failing really to progress from that point, other than for very big games such as the recent cup games against St Patrick's.

Pat Dolan's side are probably the best supported of the Dublin clubs just now but there has been a certain euphoria surrounding their return to Inchicore which is not unlike that which Shelbourne enjoyed a few years ago. Like Shelbourne, St Patrick's have managed to give the impression that they have a clear vision of where they want to go as a club and how to get there but whether they can continue to make progress in virtual isolation is open to question.

Most of the clubs will concede privately that there has to be a broader advancement if any real lasting progress is to be made. The fact that Dundalk get good crowds one year, Cork the next and Derry the year after that is not a great deal of use to anyone, core attendances have to be raised across the board and some greater degree of central co-ordination is going to be required if that is going to be achieved.

The league's administrators have expressed their frustration with the clubs before as well as with their own powerlessness, while the clubs have an alarming tendency to lay the blame for the current situation squarely at the front door of Merrion Square.

Neither position is quite right, concedes Dr Tony O'Neill, who is hoping that tonight's crunch game against Shelbourne at Belfield Park attracts one of his club's biggest crowds of the season.

"I think it's one of the things that has come out of the whole Wimbledon thing," he says. "That people have started to realise the real scope there is for the league to develop here and they've started to see more clearly their own role in making it happen."

Only now, reckons Dr O'Neill, have clubs at last come to terms with the "body blow" of overseas football on television and only over the coming few months, he predicts, will some sort of realistic counter offensive begin on the part of individual clubs.

His opposite number this evening, Damien Richardson, believes that a more centralised approach is required. Marketing, he identifies, as the key to future development of the game's market here and while his club have long been innovators in that area there is, he insists, only so much that one or two clubs can do off their own bats.

"It needs to be a collective thing because individual clubs can only push it so far before you reach a sort of plateau, that's what's seems to have happened to us at the moment we did have more than 7,000 in Tolka Park for the game against St Patrick's and not far short of that for the League Cup final.

"They were nights when there was a great atmosphere in the place and the sort of games that bring people back but what we need is more help getting people into the grounds for the first time because, from what we've seen, once they realise what you have to offer, they don't stay away again."

It would be nice, in the meantime, to say we were at least moving forward in the right direction but you can't say that at the moment, at least not with any genuine authority, as just about no reliable figures exist for attendances at games here.