XL Open director Alec Anderson hinted strongly yesterday that he and his team were considering the possibility of transforming the tournament into a full ATP Tour event in the future.

Asked yesterday whether Government’s decision to withdraw $50,000 worth of sponsorship earlier this year had forced him to review the long-term prospects for the XL, Anderson agreed that it may well be time to raise the ante.

“It’s certainly something we’ve thought about, pushing to be a full Tour event,” he said.

“The problem we’ve got at the moment is that there are other similar-sized tournaments to ours around this time of year which have come on line and spread the pool of players out a little more than in years gone by.

“We have a great relationship with the ATP and while we would have to make one or two improvements, we’re fairly confident that we have the site and the resources to run a bigger event successfully.

“So it would just be a question of sitting down and thinking carefully about the finances. My gut feeling is that the Department of Tourism would be more inclined to be involved in an event which would generate significantly more international exposure than the current tournament and so once this year is over I’ll certainly be sitting down with them to discuss the entire issue.

“We’ve got to think very carefully about whether we would be getting as good a bang for our buck as we are currently getting. From purely a sponsorship point of view, the sponsors we have are genuinely happy with the current set-up and what our event offers, and I’m not sure how much excitement there would be in terms of growing the event.

“Also, if we increased the prize money of this event to say $400,000 from the current $100,000, sure we would get one or two big names — though we’d probably have to pay them a big appearance fee as well — but I’m not convinced we’d attract that many more household names.

“The quality and depth of men’s tennis now is so impressive and of such a good quality, that a lot of the guys ranked between 50 and 100 in the world are very similar in standard — but how many of those players would be recognisable to anybody else but the hard-core tennis fan? My guess is, not many.

“So we have a lot of thinking to do because I realise that there is always a danger for an event like this to become a little stale and it’s my responsibility to look at ways to breathe new life into it. Even still, I believe we’ve got a good draw this year — perhaps not quite as strong as in some previous years — but the quality is still incredibly high.”