Frank Browne: ‘I knew when I went into the room, I knew her soul was gone’

In 2003, Frank Browne lost his six-month-old daughter to pneumonia. The tragedy has given the Mayo ladies football manager a sense of perspective on what really matters...

You want some real perspective on how football, when all’s said and done, is just that — football? Have a chat with Frank Browne, Wexford native and manager of the Mayo ladies senior football team preparing for this evening’s TG4 All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin.

On a Saturday morning in January 2003, at 20 past 10, Browne walked into a room in Mayo’s General Hospital in Castlebar where his daughter, Emma, aged just six months and two days, had died from pneumonia.