Final blow for game Brady

The war is over now for David Brady. A man of true passion, he was launched into the All-Ireland final yesterday after 11 minutes but it was already too late.

Eleven years at the top of the football ladder included Mayo making five visits to Croke Park in late September. The final report reads: one desperately cruel draw and four defeats.

Brady will always have Ballina's All-Ireland club title from 2005 but the Mayo journey has, again, ended in despair. His brother Ger will carry on the family tradition in the county colours but that's it for David. No more but no tears either. Just the resignation that follows such a heavy defeat.

"At the end of the day, football is football. Conor and Trevor (Mortimer) lost their grandfather there two weeks ago. We lost a game. You get over a game. It's not a matter of life and death. Maybe it should be to us but to me it's not.

Can this Mayo team return? "I can't answer for them. I know, certainly, I can't. For me, no. I spent 11 years playing. I tried. I tried. I'll always remember '96 and the ball (going) over the bar. When you see guys in there like after that. That's hard. That's hard.

"It's a 13-point beating. For me this is not hard. We came, we tried and it didn't work. I got what I came for. I just never got a senior medal."

The 1996 "ball over the bar" was a reference to the cruel injury-time point by Meath's Colm Coyle that forced a replay Mayo would lose. That was devastating. This is different.

"Déjà vu. Twelve points after 10, 15 minutes. You can't go crying, we were beat by 13 points. It's hard to feel upset as we were absolutely destroyed out there.

"The guys are gutted. We started thinking in 2004 (that) we weren't ready, we weren't prepared, we were a younger team, we were inexperienced.

"But the first 10, 15 minutes . . . there are no excuses for it. You can't blame the ref, the weather, the ball, the pitch. Each individual lost their individual battles out there. We hit our peak when we played Dublin four weeks ago."

Mickey Moran and John Morrison weren't hiding from the raw truth either. Kerry rightfully have them hanging on the mantelpiece with all the other mementos.

"Ten points in the first 10 minutes was too much," remarked Moran. "Kerry were never going to let us off the hook after that. They had the fish caught. The lads showed a great wee spark to bring it back to six and we thought we could get it going again but we never got the scores on the board. We've got to give credit to a great defence. They sorted us out."

Morrison saw it all as a flaw in the Mayo mindset: "Where the mind goes the body follows. It was painfully obvious in the first 15 minutes our boys were following their minds. There was a bit of naivety and apprehension with coming up against Kerry and they suffered for it.

"You can tell it in the body language. Normally boys who would be aggressively marking from the side or front all year started marking from behind. Boys weren't going for catches they would normally go for."