A full house of 82,300 was dispersing from Croke Park by the time Micheál Donoghue shared his thoughts on his team’s rampant second-half performance against Cork. Barely a handful would have been as calm as the Galway manager as he tried to make sense of it all.It was all a far cry from their lacklustre championship defeats to Kilkenny and Tipperary a year ago, which he acknowledged when he addressed the question about whether he was shocked with how far his team had come.“You’d have to say yeah,” Donoghue said, though it felt like exactly that – he had to say it, even if he didn’t believe it.“But from early on when we came back, you could just see the enthusiasm and the energy that was in the group. They’ve stayed humble, they stayed working. We have our own targets and goals, and what we want to achieve.“I think throughout the league and throughout the championship, as the team has evolved and as they’ve got more comfortable with what we wanted to do, we’ve had some really good second-half performances.“And we knew that if we were in the position we were in going into the second half, that we were well capable of pushing on again.”Cork’s Mark Coleman challenges Galway's Conor Whelan. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Pushing on was an understatement. Galway’s tackling was ravenous, the rate at which they created chances was more than enough to compensate for their mediocre conversion, and inevitably, comparisons were drawn with Cork’s second-half collapse in last year’s All-Ireland final against Tipperary. “If ye say so” was Ben O’Connor’s brisk response to that parallel being drawn.“This is a new bunch. Every one of them fellas, same as they did last year, came up to do as good as they could today,” he added.“It didn’t happen for us. We were outworked and out-hurled for long periods of it, and still with 10 minutes to go we were still in it. For the last seven or eight minutes, they really took over.“That’s not a true reflection of our lads. For everyone watching today, people are saying ‘Oh, Cork again’, but we’re better than that, we just didn’t do it today.“We had a couple of chances to put the ball over the bar and get set again but we didn’t, we tried to force goals. It was very easy for us to on the outside at the sideline and say tap the ball over the bar, but if you’re looking up at the clock and you’re seeing it running out ... the boys had the guts to go for it, they thought the goal chances were there so they went for them.“We’re telling fellas to do that all year, so I can’t be going around now saying we didn’t want them to go for it.”Cork's Robbie O'Flynn after the match. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho For Donoghue, questions of the future were straightforward, batted away with the normal stuff about recovery and review. For O’Connor, the landscape is very different. Cork’s implosion against Tipperary last season was unprecedented, but after this, the label will have stronger adhesive, removal won’t be so straightforward.“I’m a glass half-full kind of fella, that’s done and dusted,” said O’Connor, albeit without specifying what was in the glass.“There were better than us on the day, they outworked us and out-hurled us, no excuses. We’ll be sick with that for the next few days, next couple of weeks, maybe even until Christmas. But once the boys get back going again, that’s all forgotten about.“There’ll be a lot of fellas who will have all the answers, and we’ll get that. We’ll get a few letters during the week telling us where we’re all going wrong, we’ll get a few phone calls, a few messages. We’ll take that and we’ll drive on.”And for Galway? Cruise control, effectively.“We’re totally comfortable where we’re at,” said Donoghue.“We’ve full trust and belief in the group and the quality that they have. They’re still a young group and they’re still learning and evolving. They’ll still have good days and bad days, but today was a good one.”