It's just about 10 months since Barry O'Connor left Irish League champions Cliftonville to join Bray Wanderers. These days O'Connor regularly finds himself wondering what's gone wrong at both clubs.

As he prepares for this Sunday's Harp Lager FAI Cup final at Tolka Park, the first thing O'Connor had to do, like the rest of his team-mates, is try to forget what a miserable league campaign Wanderers have had. But up at Solitude the turnabout has been far more dramatic. The Belfast club has gone from the highs of winning an historic league title last year, to this year facing a relegation play-off. And, to add insult to injury, they've been chucked out of the IFA Cup final for playing an ineligible player. It's a tough call admits O'Connor, but his former club's plight is just about the more remarkable.

"I still find it difficult to believe what's gone on up there this season, but I'd still take their situation, being in a play-off and that, over ours.

"The fact is, though, that Cliftonville lost six players from last year's team and so it was always going to be difficult for them. Here, Pat (Devlin) was bringing in new players and we really thought it was going to be a good season for us. Hopefully we can win on Sunday for the fans, we'd love to give them something to cheer about after so much disappointment, but whatever happens we all know that as a team we've let ourselves down."

Despite things not working out as intended, O'Connor insists that he has no regrets about returning to the National League. Marty Quinn had tried to keep him at Solitude, while the prospect of playing European football was a considerable temptation, but Devlin was well aware that his contract was up at the Carlisle Grounds and it didn't take long for the former Shamrock Rovers and Shelbourne striker to realise that his future was with his manager from his Drogheda United days.

"I enjoyed my time with Cliftonville, but the travelling was getting on top of me a bit, and I did like the idea of playing back in Dublin again. Pat's way of doing things had always impressed me, he's very professional, so the chance of linking up with him again looked good. And even now, I'd have to say, even though things haven't worked out the way we all hoped they would, I have no regrets at all about the decision I made at the time."

Having said all that, O'Connor isn't exactly relishing the prospect of playing in the first division again next year. He did it before, for Devlin and Drogheda, and the team came up at the first attempt, but after scoring 17 goals playing from mid-field for the Irish League champions, he probably felt entitled to look forward to another few seasons of top-flight football.

"It's disappointing all right, but none of the players really has any complaint because, when it comes down to it, it was us who brought the club down by failing to perform. On a personal level, I'm very disappointed with my own contribution. I was unlucky to start with, getting a three-match ban for a sending off against Shamrock Rovers that I didn't really feel I deserved and missing out for a while with a groin injury."

O'Connor hopes to make amends during the second year of his two-year contract, although admits "a hat trick on Sunday would start to make me feel a whole lot better."

A glance at the form book for the season would scarcely suggest that O'Connor will be banging them in against Harps but, like his manager, O'Connor feels that Wanderers are capable of going into this weekend's game as underdogs and coming out cup holders.

"When you look at the league campaign there was that run of eight games when we went from being third or fourth in the table to being second from bottom because we didn't pick up a single point. Even if we'd picked up two or three during that time, I think we'd have stayed up, but when you lose eight games on the bounce like that it's very hard for a group of players to turn their season around again.

"I think the Bray that people saw during the first few weeks of the season is the real Bray. I'm not saying that we could have stayed so high in the table, but we showed people then that on our day we were more than a match for anybody and I still think that's true.

"If things had gone to plan, then we would have stayed up and something like winning the cup would have been just perfect, something that showed people that the club was really going places," O'Connor says.

"Like me, a lot of the other lads came to Bray because they wanted to win things. Well, on Sunday we want to win to show that, even though we went down, we still made the right decision."