Well, the only surprise in the end was that there were no real surprises. St Patrick's Athletic did what four clubs before them this decade had failed to do: take a narrow advantage into the last day of the season and hang on to it. It's hard not to feel sorry for Dave Barry and his Cork City players, but they could hardly have expected to finish top after their defeat at Richmond Park a couple of weeks ago.

City's demise, in fact, can be entirely linked to their three performances against St Patrick's Athletic. Take out the three meetings with the eventual champions and City would have won the title by six points. Have them even hanging on to their first half lead down in Turner's Cross back in January and the top two positions in the final table would have been reversed.

The Dubliners, though, showed their strength of character after Pat Morley had put them in front that day. St Patrick's had enjoyed a good bit of luck not to have been well out of the game by the break, but in the second half they capitalised on City's inability to put them away. Stephen McGuinness and Leon Braithwaite scored goals that day which, while hardly outstanding, were possibly the club's most important of the season.

And coach Liam Buckley showed what he was made of in that game as well. The tactical changes he made at half-time that Sunday turned the game on its head, in the process unhinging the Cork defence.

Throughout the campaign Buckley has stamped his own approach on a team built by his predecessors. It may well be, perhaps, that when people look back on this season they will see that as the day when the championship was really won and lost.

At the other end of the table, the decisive results came much later. Dundalk's spectacular collapse in their last eight games showed that attempting to pitch young locals into the fray because you need them can have disastrous results.

Even in the last month Bray had opportunities to save themselves, but defeats by Waterford and Sligo more or less sealed their fate.

And heroic runs by Sligo and, particularly, Mike Flanagan's Waterford side, whose astonishing late season form matched that of either City or St Patrick's during the first couple of months of the campaign, left Bohemians to slide back into the play-off slot on the last day of the season.

For Roddy Collins's side to join Dundalk in the first division next season would certainly be one of the more remarkable features since the first division was established back in the mid-1980s. Bohemians, however, have shown in recent months that not only are they the only team in the country on their day capable of beating the champions at Richmond Park, but that they can, when the desire takes them, produce some pretty hapless stuff capped, usually, by an astonishing ability to pass up scoring opportunities.

After St Patrick's, Dundalk and Bohemians have been two of the most consistent performers since 1985 when the two tier league was established, and so their current predicaments seem all the more astonishing.

No less surprising, though, has been the showing of the other one of the top four in the table - Shamrock Rovers - whose main difficulty last season was their performances against the top of couple of clubs but who now, after spending more than £100,000 on players in an attempt to remedy that situation, find themselves just one win clear of the play-offs themselves.

Mick Byrne's team, like many others this season, found it difficult to regularly find the net. Overall, the current campaign produced around 50 fewer goals than any of the previous five seasons, while the average number produced per game was lower only once (1992-93) in the history of the premier division.

That's not especially encouraging in a league that still doesn't come close to attracting back spectators. And if some of the big clubs decide next season that the way to avoid a repeat of this year's troubles is to play a more negative game then, for all the excitement produced by the two horse title race in recent months, this will not end up being remembered as a particularly good season for the league.