Derry's Brian Maher will not rush into a decision on his future

Brian Maher insists he’s going to take some time before deciding his future.

The 24-year-old, who will be a free agent when his Derry City contract expires, confirmed that he hasn’t been thinking about the future, as he was only focused on the club’s end to the 2024 season.

“I need to have conversions, but I’ve not really looked at it at all,” he admitted.

“I’ve tried to focus on the pitch and now that we don’t have that anymore it’s going to come down to speaking to people.

“I suppose seeing what the plans are for the club for next season and beyond, but it’s really difficult for me to answer anything at the minute, because genuinely, you ask any player in the dressing room, I haven’t thought about my future or spoken to people about it, all I wanted to do genuinely was to win trophies here and unfortunately we’ve fallen short today (Sunday).”

Maher, who was brought to Foyleside by Ruaidhrí Higgins in 2022, believes the Limavady native is the right man to remain in the Brandywell hot-seat.

“Yeah off course,” he confirmed. “There’s absolutely work to be done, he knows that and there probably needs to be a few changes in the off season, probably just freshen up the place.

“But it’s hard to look that far now to be honest. You look around the ground, the support we had was incredible, despite all the talk of people on social media and stuff, you see the real support we had today.

“You know proper support, unbelievable numbers like they always are and that’s not taking swipes at anybody.

"You look at it and think ‘wow what a support today’ and just want to give something back like we did two years ago, but it just wasn’t to be.”

Incredibly if the Foylesiders had won their last three matches - two in the league and the cup final - they would have completed a league and cup double, but instead Higgins’ men lost all three, finished fourth and have no European football in 2025.

“Our finish was as bad as it can be,” he insisted. “There’s places where we went wrong, but I can’t sum it up.

IN ACTION... Brian Maher makes a save during Sunday's FAI Cup final.

“I’m absolutely not going to stand here and allow people to start pointing at one person or one player or anything like that because it’s a collective effort.

“We win football matches not because of one player and we don’t lose them because of one person or one player, so the criticism towards the group is fair enough, because we’re the ones out on the pitch and over the last few weeks we haven’t done enough.”

A major talking point amongst the City faithful was the mentality of Higgins’ squad that when they came to the business end of the season they failed to turn up.

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“That would be a point, but all the cup games this year were big games and we turned up in every single one,” he stated.

“We turned up in so many big games over the last three years, European games, cup games, league games, so it’s probably a lazy one at times to say that.

“But people will obviously say probably our last couple of games were the biggest ones but we’ve had a lot of big games go our way, but the last couple of weeks is really hard to put your finger on.

“But yeah those last three games are probably the ultimate three over the last few years.”

DISAPPOINTED

The Dubliner was bitterly disappointed after their Sports Direct FAI Cup Final defeat to Drogheda United and conceded that City’s performance wasn’t good enough.

“It wasn’t good enough and we’re all really disappointed,” he added.

“There is obviously going to be a lot of criticism and people will come out swinging, but there’s a core of the dressing room who are really deeply hurt by that and deeply hurt with what has gone on over the last few weeks.

“Sadness is probably the big word, as we gave ourselves such an opportunity, we had some really bad times during the year, but kept coming back and kept coming back and we put ourselves in a position to win two trophies and now in the space of a couple of weeks we now have none, so it’s hard to take.”