On Soccer:Irish Premier League chairman David Chick's vision, expressed at the Setanta Cup's original launch a couple of years back, of a competition that would "highlight all that is positive about our leagues and . . . cascade through all levels of our game", continues to look half fulfilled after this year's final in Belfast.

After a decent mix of games the tournament produced an entertaining final, between Linfield and Drogheda United, watched by the biggest crowd to attend one yet. However, serious questions remain how best to progress over the long term an event whose appeal needs to be broadened if it really is to make a deep and lasting impact on the Irish game as a whole.

The tournament has bedded down well with the prize-money on offer and the novelty factor involved ensuring both the island's leading clubs and their supporters take the venture seriously. Initial fears that particular games might be marred by violence have faded almost completely and the policing of Saturday's game at Windsor Park provided little sense there was any political significance at all to what was transpiring on the pitch.

Interest levels among the wider public remain difficult to gauge, however, as a significant percentage of those who view events on Setanta do so in bars where numbers are difficult even to estimate. For obvious reasons, the games are not televised by anybody else and this has the inevitable effect of limiting the exposure. Still, the decision by a company that has become a key player in the televised sports market to stick with the event for a further four years (until 2012) suggests they reckon they are getting a decent return on their investment.

A number of previous attempts at cross-border competitions have had just that sort life-span - eight years - and the decisions taken now on the future of the tournament will be critical in determining whether the Setanta Cup can do more than simply burn with moderate intensity for a few years before fizzling out like its predecessors.

Many observers, of course, hoped that the competition would, given the right political environment, help lay the groundwork for an All-Ireland League, and with the politicians, after so many false dawns, certainly having held up their end of the deal there seems little reason to alter that assessment of its potential.

Right now, though, the organisers must look at ways in which they can maintain the competition's momentum without getting ahead of its participants.

After Saturday's game in Belfast Linfield manager David Jeffrey wasn't exactly hollering in public for a merger of the two leagues but he did acknowledge the extent to which fatigue had hindered his side's ability to compete against Drogheda.

Previously he has called for the reduction in the size of the Irish League's Premier Division from 16 sides to something a little more realistic and there are rumblings that something is afoot north of the Border in this department but that could actually make matters worse as a 10-team top flight would normally increase each team's programme from 30 to 36 games.

Concentrating the limited pool of quality within Irish League is clearly essential but there has to be the potential to look at ways of holding games at weekends rather than obliging teams, as the Irish League outfits have repeatedly done this year, to play in the all-Ireland competition a little over 24 hours after completing Irish League or Cup games.

Only Linfield have been able to cope with the demands placed upon them by that sort of schedule. Dungannon, Portadown and Glentoran, meanwhile, have all looked poor with five wins between them from their 44 games in the competition and if the League of Ireland sides continue their dominance it will not be good for anybody in the long term.

Linfield, of course, were not helped on Saturday by having had to play some 57 games over the course of the campaign and it seems an early choice that needs to be made is whether there is a willingness to allow the major clubs walk away from some of the less significant competitions to concentrate on something that most observers see as having the potential to amount to a good deal more.

With the obvious constraints imposed by the different seasons as well as Uefa's reluctance to see "unofficial" tournaments flourish at the expense of domestic championships there are no easy solutions.

But such a move combined with an upper limit being placed on the number of league games to be played might allow for the expansion and rescheduling of a tournament that retains the potential to be very good for the wider game here.

Whether anything nearly so dramatic happens in the immediate future will depend to a considerable extent on Setanta themselves as major changes in competition formats are generally driven by broadcasters these days and in this instance that central player doesn't appear to have settled yet on just what it is it wants to happen.