Siblings driving attacking line

Connacht SF Final/Mayo v Roscommon: In the family quarry in Galway, the Mortimer brothers wait and work and try not to talk football. That is their week. At lunchtimes, when the machinery falls silent and the boys take the weight off their feet on the old swivel chairs in the office, Trevor's mobile often dances to calls from bored friends seeking updates from an inside man.

Trevor finds amusement in the phone calls. Last winter, when studying in Leeds, he often felt torn between the pleasure of being away from the gossip of Mayo football for a few months and an almost insatiable need to know every small detail.

So he understands the incessant, almost hourly curiosity that plagues friends in the days before a Connacht final. On the day we met, Trevor had scarcely leaned against the desk in the office when he received his first call.

Their father Frank was pouring over some work-books and, outside, the sky was low and menacing and the view from the window took in the intimidating chipped stone face of the quarry and the definitively low fields of Connacht's interior. Trevor laughed. His younger brother Conor, the more guarded and world-weary of the two, smiled and shook his head as he slouched back in his seat and toyed with a mandarin orange.

On big-time Irish Sundays, these two boys form the bones of Mayo's inside attacking line and, because they are both sallow and athletic, Trevor shaven headed and Conor with a blond, styled do, they are highly visible and recognisable. The Mortimers from Shrule: if you do not know of them then you aren't from around here.

"The thing about us," explains Trevor, "is that we probably know more people from Galway than Mayo. Like, the business here is in Galway and before that we had a sand quarry over in Dunmore. My father boarded in St Mary's in Galway city and Conor and myself both went there.

"Even the last day playing Galway, I went to school with two of the full-back line and was in college with the other men. Seán Óg de Paor taught us both. To be honest, I knew most of those Galway lads before I knew most of the Mayo players."

The Mortimer boys work six days a week and play football on a Sunday. Shrule is on the southern tip of the Galway/Mayo border, a village that thrives on the bragging rights on offer after the counties play each other in high summer.

"For a few years, the pub at home used be packed with lads in from Headford and Caherlistrane after Galway were playing on a Sunday," Trevor laughs. "Haven't seen too many of them around lately. But, ah, we all get on. Shrule is one of those typical Irish villages that just revolves around football."

He estimates, with the precision of a man who has timed himself on many mornings, that the journey from Shrule to the quarry takes 16 minutes. Every second evening, the brothers motor straight over to Castlebar for training. On off nights, they head to the swimming pool or to Derek Savage's gym in Tuam.

Trevor doesn't mind repetitive gymwork, but Conor, a light wraith of a forward who packs a ferociously accurate free-kick, admits he finds pumping steel a chore.

"They are always telling me to go at it. But I suppose I don't get into situations where I would be trying to break tackles. That would be the likes of Trevor or Kieran McDonald. I would as soon give it off and get it back, rely on speed or skill or whatever it is."

Trevor nods somewhat glumly at this assessment. Although of a cheerful disposition, he has that Mayo knack of appearing mournful when considering things. The reason weights came up was because of mention of Armagh's deconstruction of Donegal in Croke Park, a performance marked by scoring class and founded on formidable physical strength clearly evidenced by many sets of bulging forearms.

Mayo's style of football was analysed. The lonely county has been pilloried for many reasons over the years, but no critic has ever accused them of playing unattractive football. Perhaps more than any other county, Mayo is wedded to the philosophy of pure football.

"That might be true," Conor said. "And I suppose it matters all right that we play well. Against Galway, it came together and I was surprised all right that we beat them the way we did, going from six points down to winning by six. But it was only one game and it is over now. Playing nice football is all very well, but you can't let it come before getting a result."

Trevor nodded. "Last year, after the Connacht final, I met Seán Óg on the street and we were talking about the All-Ireland and he said, 'I'd love to see ye win it, it would be great if the nice guys did it'. I thought about that for a long time.

"Because he was making a valid point. Like, I could have gone out the last day and cleaned the head off Pádraic Joyce and he mightn't talk to me for a while. And you might say to yourself, so what, we won? But then you have to ask yourself, would it be right to do that? Would you really want to?

"It is a two-way thing. Like, it is all very well getting praised for playing nice football, but fuck it, if you won an All-Ireland playing bad football, you would take it quick enough too."

The Mortimers grew up in annual expectation that their older brother, Kenneth, would bring an All-Ireland into the house. Their father, and grandfather George, all played Gaelic games for the parish teams, but Kenneth was "the one who brought Shrule up in the eyes of Mayo people".

Twice an All-Star, in 1996 and 1997, he set the tone for his siblings and ensured that the minor selectors kept an eye on them when they came of age.

"Kenneth would still be good enough to play for the county," Conor reckons. "But he has family now and is happy enough playing golf and with a few pints. He still plays with the club. The man lost 10 or 11 All-Ireland medals playing between schools and Mayo so I don't know how he kept motivating himself. But he did his time."

In Kenneth's prime, though, provincial honours rained down hard and fast. Trevor is five years playing with the county. Conor is in his third season, but both are awaiting their first senior Connacht medals. In that time, the Maughan era dissolved, Trevor played on a Mayo team that lost a Connacht final (to Roscommon) through an injury-time goal.

Maughan has come back, still tanned and charming, but more serene now, and as Trevor noted "fair as they come", and no longer inclined to will Mayo to an All-Ireland through sheer physical effort. With him is Liam McHale, poster boy on the sunshine days of Mayo and the first man they sought to pelt with tomatoes in the stocks when it all went wrong.

"Liam is good," nods Conor. "He would work a lot with the forwards and the thing he has been stressing is how to stay cool and calm in front of goal. Just small tips that have been a help."

"And the thing about John," adds Trevor, "is that he has got the best possible squad together. Brady is back, Kieran Mac is back. In the last few years, there was always the bit of an excuse that there was one or two lads missing. Not this time. We have nothing to fall back on, which is good. It is do or die."

Against Galway, it was affirmatively and gloriously the former, the most assured Mayo performance witnessed in Castlebar for many years. Trevor, playing with a sprained back muscle, won plenty of ball while Conor, roving around the field, finished with eight points.

That night, there was indignation in Mayo when it became apparent that two of RTÉ's analysts had taken issue with the less than conservative image favoured by McDonald and Conor Mortimer. The younger player shapes his hair with gel on match days. At work, it is matted down. Both wear old tracksuits and heavy-duty boots.

"I heard that something was said, but I never watched the video of the game so I don't know exactly what," Conor shrugged with true indifference.

"The thing is they know nothing about you - they don't know what you work at or what you do during the week. What I do is my business and what they do is theirs. That's how I see it. But whatever they say makes no odds to me."

"You would think" added Trevor, "that two lads who played would have more to be talking about, though."

But Mayo players are accustomed to such acute examination. It comes with the territory. On nights the brothers go out, they often favour the anonymity of Galway city - just a 15-minute taxi drive away - to where their friends head out in Ballinrobe.

"If you have a couple of pints, before you know it it's all over the place that you were on the piss. It is a waste of time," says Trevor.

"Like, in Mayo people are just mad for football and it is a great thing on one level, but at times you just want to duck out away from it."

But as Conor notes, the weeks are so crammed now there is little time for life outside work and football anyway. "We never get to lie on in the morning," he sighs.

"That's probably the worst of it. Like, you leave for here at eight in the morning and if you head to training, you don't get home until half past 10 or something. Often, I would skip dinner after training because you just want to get home and have a bit of time to yourself."

It gets harder as the days grow more humid. July is a dangerous month for Mayo football, the time when the season often comes unhinged. Trevor only returned to training this week. Conor, after undergoing a groin operation in the winter, has been working steadily through. They know each other's game inside out.

"The lads give out to me because when I get a ball, he is the first man I look for," he says nodding his head to where Conor sits.

"It's not intentional or anything, it's just I know his runs now like the back of my hand and it is just on instinct. I suppose it is because he is my brother, too. It's good that we are playing along side each other, not just for ourselves, but for the family and the town as well, I suppose."

If tomorrow goes well for Mayo, the Shrule folk will pour into Galway to tell their neighbours all about it. The Mortimer boys will feel like something has been accomplished, that they have a substantial achievement to match with the long days.

In lighter moments, they talk vaguely of bright days ahead, of playing in Croke Park, where they have not been for three years.

"That's where you want to play, not around here," says Trevor, looking out at the quarry and the quiet fields.

But this is the landscape of Connacht and this part of the world is their only concern for the time being. Thinking beyond is just foolishness. The machines - the great, heavy crushers and diggers are coughing back to life again.

Conor wolfs his mandarin - "that'll have to be it for lunch today" - and climbs into the control seat of one of the diggers. Trevor heads across towards the smooth stone wall with its thousand cuts.

If Mayo has its summer of summers, the people could well chisel their heroes' faces into these blank copper- coloured walls. Mount Mortimer.

The boys would laugh at the indulgence of the idea. Anyway, one of the reasons they like the family workplace is because it forms a shelter from their football world, with the quietness and the solitude and the rhythms of work getting them through, brothers faithfully chipping and splintering their way through a stone wall that has no end.