Derry City could face the ignominy of watching Shelbourne win the League title at the Brandywell on Friday night as a disappointing 2024 campaign comes to an anticlimactic finish.
For months, City fans had bookmarked this game as a potential winner-takes-all clash between the two teams that have contested top spot for most of the year, but a series of poor results, culminating in the previous week’s 1-0 defeat at St. Patrick’s Athletic, has taken Derry out of the reckoning completely.
In fact, even if the Candystripes do win on Friday night, they could still finish in fourth place depending on results elsewhere.
Victory should secure European football for the fourth successive season, but it has been a flat atmosphere in the city all week as the club’s hopes of ending a 27-year wait for a League title came to a miserable end.
“It has been very difficult,” boss Ruaidhri Higgins admitted. “There’s no point in saying otherwise, it has been. It’s just very strange when you have so much hope and expectation and then it’s gone and the realisation of that.
“We had our goal right the way through the season, and it was to try and win the League, and we haven’t been successful at that and it’s obviously extremely disappointing, but we have a job in our hands now to finish in the top three.
“When you get into the second-last game with a chance of winning the League and then you have a job to finish in the top three, it just shows you the nature of it.
“It’s been a mad year and a rollercoaster-type year, but we have to finish the season strong at home and get ourselves then prepared for the following week.”
The Candystripes chief has a number of injury problems ahead of Friday night’s game, with Ben Doherty, Ciaran Coll, Patrick McEleney and Pat Hoban almost certain to miss out.
With the FAI Cup Final against Drogheda United on Sunday, November 10 very much on his mind, Higgins has to think very carefully about his starting XI against Shelbourne.
“We obviously have some issues, and we have to be very, very careful because we don’t want to leave ourselves short, but you have to strike a balance, too, of keeping people at it and keeping people game sharp.
“It’s a balancing act, but we still want to finish with a home win and give us a bit of momentum in the following week.”
Victory for Derry on Friday night will mean the best home record in a season since 2006. No City team since has managed to win 10 home games in a single Premier Division campaign.
The current City squad has already scored more than Stephen Kenny’s team of 18 years previously, and Higgins understandably wants to add to that ahead of a massive Cup Final at the Aviva Stadium.
“We finished the season with a good win last year against St Pat’s, and we want to do the same again this year,” Higgins said.
“We want to finish the season strongly at home, we want to win the game and we want to go into the following week having won our last game, and we’ll do everything in our power to do that.
“We know what’s coming up here, we know there’s so much on the line for them, but we have to have a bit of balance and show loads of pride and show how proud we are to represent this club because that’s really important.”