Jason Knight says he is ambitious but will "live and die" by his own decision regarding his future with Derby County.
Knight was previously linked with Premier League moves to Newcastle, Leeds United and Everton but if he stays with Derby, he will be playing League One football again next season after the Rams' failure to secure promotion.
The 22-year-old has a year left on his contract and appears to be torn between a move and staying with the club that he has played 125 League games for since joining from Cabinteely United in 2019.
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Certainly, the Dubliner believes the Rams are back on an even keel after turbulent times on and off the pitch.
"I am an ambitious person, and I want to play at the highest level I can at club level and international level," said Knight, who picked up the man of the match award for Ireland in the 3-0 defeat of Gibraltar on Monday night.
"But it's a great club, there are a lot of great people there. And I think there are foundations being built again to make it go up the levels and there are certain people behind the scenes pushing it.
"There are good times ahead at Derby, the club is in a good place now.
"It's a fine line and I will have to assess everything in the summer. I'll get away for a couple of weeks and shut my mind off and make the decision in the pre-season."
Derby return to pre-season at the end of the month so Knight doesn't have too much time to reflect on his future.
Ireland boss Stephen Kenny raised hackles at Derby at the start of the month when he suggested that the midfielder was 'on the verge' of a move.
Kenny said: "A lot of clubs want to buy Jason, which will be good for him, to get back to playing at a level higher than League One.
"Derby have been great to him, he's played a high amount of games for them for someone so young. But he's at that stage where he probably needs to go and play at a higher level to kick on."
Knight was aware of Kenny's comments but immediately pointed out his contractual situation, before adding that he hadn't had time to address the situation with his international manager.
"It's time for some downtime now and I will assess everything before the start of pre-season and see what happens," he said.
"I might speak to him in the off-season and see what he says, but we haven’t really talked that much about it.
"Of course, I will take the manager’s advice in, but I'm my own man as well and I need to make my own decision and I will live and die by them. We'll see what happens."
Knight, who came off the bench in the 2-1 loss to Greece last Friday night, revealed that he only learned on the eve of the Gibraltar game that he would be employed in a not wholly unfamiliar right wing role in the wake of Matt Doherty's red card in Athens.
"It was alright," he said. "I've played there a couple of times with Derby as well so it wasn’t out of the blue, I knew what to expect.
"It was said to me on Sunday that I might be playing in this role and I embraced it. I was happy to get on the pitch first of all, and I took to it well and it went alight.
"Thankfully, we had a lot of the ball as well so I could get forward and create chances and try and go forward as much as I could. I was happy with how it panned out.
"It was the right response and what we needed, we needed a good result and a good performance. Getting man of the match was a nice cherry on top as well.
"We're young guys but a lot of us are experienced now and we need to take that Greece performance on the chin and as players, we need to drive that as well.
"We can’t put it all down to the manager and the management team. We have to take responsibility as well and I think we stepped up and put on a good performance and that's all we can do.
"We're only three games in and there's still a lot of football to be played. You never know what happens in football, we have some really good looking games coming up in September and let's see what we can do."
