Maybe it's just the lingering euphoria of last Friday night's exciting Dublin derby at Tolka Park but the most interesting thing about the viewing figures revealed by RTÉ last week for the second week of their Sunday evening sports programme Sunday Sport is not so much that the show outperformed the station's own English Premiership highlights programme aired the night before, but rather there was so much surprise about the figures, writes Emmet Malone

In fact Sunday Sport beat The Premiership by around 25 per cent, pulling in some 210,000 viewers as compared with 170,000 for its rival. The news only served to confirm something that had seemed rather obvious for several years now: that the national broadcaster's initial decision to devote such a large chunk of its resources to covering the Premiership was a poor call by an organisation that, for a variety of reasons, had never really given the domestic game a fair chance.

Around the same time that RTÉ Sport was talking about ploughing such a huge investment into a league that was already well served by two broadcasters with vastly superior resources, it was also coming under considerable pressure to develop its coverage of the Eircom League.

There were many problems for the organisation, not least the fact that there were striking differences of opinion within the league's clubs themselves as to what sort of coverage was wanted.

However, despite the lack of a coherent strategy the live games initially televised delivered respectable audiences during the 1997/98 season, with the numbers gradually building until several achieved close to 200,000 viewers.

Those figures, when RTÉ launched The Premiership in late 1998, was pretty much the high-water mark for that programme and it has fairly consistently attracted between 150,000 and 200,000 viewers since.

Then, as now, Montrose claims to hammer the equivalent BBC/ITV programme in the ratings and then, as now, the obvious question is that if that is true why spend such huge money on something that apparently does not even have the potential to deliver much more than the local equivalent.

Live games this season, it has to be conceded, have not done terribly well with Shamrock Rovers and Bohemians faring best back in November with 99,000 and Shelbourne and Rovers a month later managing just 60,000. But the problems with RTÉ's coverage of the games remain obvious.

The early indications with regard to the Sunday evening highlights programme are more encouraging. However, while it was anticipated three years ago that a long-term plan would be agreed between the FAI and RTÉ, the word from Merrion Square this time is that no deal will be concluded on international games for after the World Cup until a satisfactory arrangement is arrived at in relation to the National League.

On the league's side there finally seems to be a hardening consensus that highlights are the way to go and while there are due to be a further four live games this season - the semis and final of the FAI Cup as well as a league match, probably on the last day of the season - the initial success of Sunday Sport, if sustained, looks to provide a promising starting point for the talks.

RTÉ, of course, have not been entirely to blame for the lack of progress to date. For a start they have not, as the last couple of weeks once again demonstrated, been dealing with the most unified or dynamic of organisations. The fact they could not get either of the games they wanted gives an idea of the sort of difficulties they continue to encounter.

The payment of a couple of thousand euro to Dundalk this week, and the promise that similar payments will be made by the league out of its marketing budget to other clubs who prove equally accommodating, looks set to smooth the situation over for the moment and so the programme should now obtain a sufficient diet of games to keep it going until the season's end.

The frustration felt by league commissioner Roy Dooney at the reluctance of clubs to play ball with such a potentially important development of the league's media coverage is, however, all too easy to understand.

The hope is that having eyed each other up for a ridiculously long time, the league and RTÉ have finally realised their relationship could amount to more than some sort of shotgun wedding.

The truth is that given their respective financial positions and the continually changing face of sports coverage on the international scene, they're potentially a marriage made in heaven.