By John Harrington

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Galway manager Micheál Donoghue did his best to play down the significance of the Tribesmen’s victory over Tipperary in today’s Allianz Hurling League Final.

That’s not an easy thing to do when your team has just hammered the reigning All-Ireland champions by 16 points.

But as pleased as Donoghue was with the performance, he warned his players not to get carried away with the win. “We're delighted with the win but we're still very, very conscious of the year and trying to get our ship in order,” he said.

“We had the win and the margin was wide but there's still a lot to work on now over the next couple of weeks.

“I know after today everything will be exaggerated again, but we just have to keep these boys on the ground and stay working hard.

“As I said there is a lot of work-ons that we need to take on and while Tipp had an off-day today they’re still the All-Ireland champions.

“Winning is a habit and we’re trying to feed the habit as much as we can. It’s going to be good for our confidence but the 28th of May still isn’t far away.”

Everywhere you looked there were huge positives to take from this match from a Galway point of view. One of them was certainly the positive impact that Johnny Glynn made after coming on as a substitute.

Donoghue worked hard to persuade him to return from New York and rejoin the panel, and was pleased with how seamlessly he slotted back in.

"Ah look in Johnny's case, he's a massive personality in the group, in and around the scene, and he'd a massive impact when he came on,” said Donoghue. “We're delighted that he's part of the squad.”

It’s still unclear whether Glynn is home for good or will dividing his time between Galway and New York over the coming months.

The man himself was coy on the subject after the game, saying, “look, we’ll see, we’ll see in the next few weeks lads.”

He was more forthcoming on Galway’s performance, revealing he and his team-mates expected to play as well as they did.

“We did, yeah,” said Glynn. “I came back to train there a few weeks ago and I was a long way off the pace and I knew well the boys were flying it so I know where I have to get to and hopefully we’ll get there and sure we’ll see where we are later in the year or something like that.”

All the Galway players who spoke after the match preached a similar message. As far as they’re concerned there’s a lot more to come from a team that still has room for improvement.

“It was a good performance for some parts of the game, but we have some parts we still need to work on,” said Padraig Mannion.

“Look it, the work-rate is there, and as Micheál has been saying for the past few weeks, consistency is what we want.

“It's been something that's probably been lacking in past Galway teams, consistency throughout a season or two.

“We've seen throughout the League that we just wanted to build a consistent team and I think we're starting to see that come together now."

The only negative on a hugely negative day for Galway hurling was the torn calf muscle that ruled Conor Cooney out of the equation.

He's expected to be sidelined for a number of weeks, but Galway are hopeful he'll be fit for their Leinster Quarter-Final against Dublin on May 28. 

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