Aidan Fitzmaurice

Derry have Derry City to themselves. They have the captive audience, they have an audience, they have an airport, they have so much going for them and they haven't been able to manage that. And this points to a bigger thing of how they run their club. And I think this shows that they're a couple of years behind the likes of Shamrock Rovers in terms of managing a situation like this and running a club, not just a team.

Yeah. So very top heavy because they've spent big on players and not MASH to listen to. No, and again, recruitment has been, look, anybody, any club in any league, anywhere, Bayern Munich can have all the staff they want and recruit poorly. But I think Derry's recruitment strategy the last couple of years has been, there hasn't been one. You know, the policy two years ago was they went after the, when Tiernan Lynch was there, the policy was get experienced guys. So they signed four or five

Guys all in the same frame, all from Northern Ireland, all who've been in England, all ex-internationals, the likes of Shane Ferguson, Liam Boyce, Gavin White, Carl Whitehead, players like that, who all fit the same bracket. Colonel Lynch's plan was get these guys, get the Blue Rinse Brigade. They have that experience, the knowledge. It didn't work. They went a different way this year. They signed players from within the league. They went for James Clark. They just signed Dara Burns back from the UK. There's no logic to Derry's recruitment. And that points to the fact that Mark Connolly has only just been appointed to director of football. That's an appointment that should have been made years ago.

No, and I think in time, I think if James hasn't said anything, but I think James has made a lot of mistakes, particularly social media comments the last couple of weeks. I think it was a mistake to go on RTE in the first place when you're mid-season. I think it was a mistake to talk about his club in the sense he did when he's on RTE. To me, that doesn't show a focus on your job. Your job is playing for Derry City.

There are enough people out there who could be a panelist for the World Cup. So I think that was a mistake. His social media comments, which appeared to be, he was a little bit hiding back, holding back a little bit, but reading between the lines, criticising Tiernan Lynch, taking a social media ban and then going back on social media after a couple. So I think James has made a lot of mistakes and I think somebody close to him needs to sit him down and realise that. I think...

staying off social media permanently would be a good move. But I think there's a bit of bruised pride here. I think the fact that Derry was a big project. One of the problems here, Derry set the bar very high when they signed James and they also signed his brother Patrick as part of that deal. They paid money to get Patrick from Sligo Rovers. They set out their stall. They said they were going to win the league. They didn't say where we're going to try and compete. We're going to challenge. James and the club both come out and said, we are going to win the league this year. 29 years is too long for Derry to be without a league title. They spoke about building a dynasty, winning a couple in a row.

And they made the mistake, first of all, they made the mistake of thinking that football can fix it, that we'll win the league, we'll get in the Champions League, everything will be fixed. And those problems I spoke about earlier on, not having the structures, not having a CEO, people in operations level, people in promotions working within the city to promote the club, they weren't there. But also I think there's a bit of hard pride for James because it hasn't worked. The big plan was the team would be built around him. The plan was he wouldn't play left back or left wing back as we've seen in the last while. The plan was to play him as a sixth and I think James saw himself as directing the play, driving on this team.

And it hasn't worked football-wise, and I think that did affect James, and maybe that threw everything off course a little bit, because the results were poor. So the dream was, James comes back, the brother comes on board with him, they get all these players back, they go on and they win the league, and somebody finally puts it up to Shamrock Rovers, because Shamrock Rovers haven't had a...

Apart from Shelburne, Sharman and Grovers haven't had a challenge in years. They're 10 points clear already. Sorry, St Pat's have cut that back now, but it looks like they haven't had... Derry were going to be the challengers. And that, I think, has affected James's mindset that the plan didn't work out. And James, I think, struggled a little bit with that. So, I mean, he's kind of...

Was he good, bad and different? Did he just look like a fish out of water playing midfield? Was it the team around him that was struggling more so as well? He didn't stand out as a 100 cap player and player with years of experience in the English Premier League, but he's 37 and he's had a lot of injuries the last while and he's dropped down the leagues he didn't have. Sometimes players come back and they, again, I think it's a little bit prisoner of your own hype or something like that. Similar to Damien Duff when Damien Duff came back with Sharmac Rovers and Damien was honest. He admitted, he said there was one game he played for Sharmac Rovers against Bowes at the Leinster Senior Cup. Not a big game. It was...

And he just knew, he said, he was up against a 20-year-old and he said, I'm gone, I can't, I can't do this. David Delaney had a very memorable moment as well. Yeah, so you need to accept that reality. Sometimes it's gone. And I think James had this idea that it would work. And the fact that they're in Europe, Europe as well. And again, I think he seemed to be critical of the performances in Europe. I disagree with James on that. I think the teams are up against CSK, Sofia.

were much better opposition than Rijeka. I think they would beat most League of Ireland clubs. I think Shamrock Rovers would probably struggle against CSK, Sofia or Rijeka. I think that's, you know, that's clear. But I think...

in any an artist coming back to maybe come back getting a band back together or something like that when you have it in your head and James couldn't point to nine out of ten performances every week and that age thing playing and set from a field it's a younger league I think James left the league in 2012 it's younger who's he up against he's up against Matt Healy who's 21 he's up against Dawson Devoy who's 23, 24 these young guys who are fit the players are better now he's up against are better than the players he was up against when James left the league in 2011 sorry 2011 yeah

What's this big truth? Like, what is McLean so unhappy with that he's not just coming out and talking about? This is part of the problem that he hasn't come out and said. And James has. There is an obsessive media in the Derry Journal. You know, the Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Independent all operate in Derry. Two local radio stations, BBC, Foyle. He has numerous...

If he wanted to sit down with any journalist or arrange a press conference, he would have had a room full in a hotel. So he didn't come out and say it. I think he was talking to people within the league and was known within the league that standards under Tiernan Lynch were very low. Standards, from what I'm told, players, the training wasn't good, days off, opposition weren't scouted. Tiernan Lynch did not have the attention to detail that maybe James was used to as a manager.

But there's a way of dealing with that then. To me, the way to deal with that is you go to Lynch and you say, listen, I'm not happy here. And maybe they come back to him saying, there's no chain of command. There's no director of football above him or a CEO or club owner. It's just Lynch that he didn't go and address those concerns and say, it's my hometown club. You know, James isn't just a professional who rocks around and playing for his eighth club in eight countries, as some players do. It's his hometown club. He really wanted this to work. And to be fair to him, he may well have gone to Lynch. Yeah.

He may well have gone to Lynch several times and felt he was getting nowhere, then he went public. So we haven't heard that from James, but I don't think so. But it was not, let's just say it was known within Derry supporter circles and they just felt that things were very lax. There was a video that came out last year where, after the defeat, you know, video of the players out in the town in Derry. Derry is just like, it's a city that's a village. People, you find out things very quickly. So players were criticised for that last year. There was a lot of things going on, but I do get the sense that

It was known within the league that the standards were not as high as they should have been just on that, that they weren't researching the opposition, they weren't looking at opposition, they weren't properly researching the players, signing players and then ending up with a bit of a dud.

To be fair, Lynch isn't here to defend himself, but that's your understanding from talking to multiple sources. My understanding is that standards were not as high as they should have been. I'm sure he'd dispute that, but you're allowed to talk to your sources. And possibly, in turn, Lynch had a model that maybe it worked for McLaren, and maybe that was his model, and he was very successful at McLaren. Maybe that's the way he operated at McLaren, and it didn't work. It's a different league, different environment. We don't know, but certainly it would have been known, chatter in the league between...

Soccer is different to GAA because you only play for one county, but players play for different counties, sorry, plays for different clubs. You could have somebody in the Derry City dressing room who's played for three clubs and he's got mates there and players talk. But certainly I think standards were low in the team, but I think that just talks to a bigger picture of where Derry City should be as a club and not just as a team. So maybe that's the justifiable frustration on McLean's part. He went public with it.

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