Noel Lane stands in the powerful evening heat, the gangly athlete recognisable in him yet. Galway at home in Thurles. New days indeed. He moves to the shade of the Semple Stadium stand to deliver a verdict. Keith Duggan report

"On the day the ball ran for us and when they had a man sent off, we just seemed to get totally on top. Our forwards had a good supply of ball but I mean they weren't all that sharp. I wasn't that happy at all with the forwards, there was a few of them replaced. There is a lot of work to be done.

"But it was our first big game - but having said that, we have nothing to be going home crowing about. Cork are not the team that they used to be or that they can be and we are not going to be fooled by that. We didn't play particularly well, it's just that Cork, on the day, didn't get the breaks, it didn't go for them."

So after a long summer of training Galway can plan for another outing in a few weeks.

Lane said it was 10 months since Galway's last championship game - in fact they trounced Down 7-15 to 0-13 last month - "and now we have only two weeks. We were let off the hook in a way today, if Cork had played better today, we might have paid the price. We were rusty enough, made a lot of mistakes. We have a lot of work to do and only two weeks to do it".

We find big Joe Rabbitte in the corner of a heaving Galway dressing-room. Joe has seen a lot of faces come and go since his own first day in the early 1990s. Now, he is the daddy of them all.

"The last serious match we played was Tipperary in the League quarter-final. We are happy to have this one over us. We hope we can raise it again now and win a quarter-final, but we have much to do. You could see things were not going so well."

Eugene Cloonan is as modest off the field as he is outrageous on it. He blinks shyly as the questions come hot and heavy.

"We got 21 points, but maybe there was a few we should have scored that we missed, maybe we should have been a point or two up at the break. But it's not a bad scoreline. It went well for Diarmuid (his brother) today, it was his first match but he has been playing well all summer and thankfully it went well for us."

Cork leave Thurles quickly. You can see the setback in their eyes. Bertie Óg Murphy, the ever gracious manager, stops underneath the stand to offer his final words of the championship.

"I think the goal after half-time was crucial. If we got that, we would have settled and had a cushion, but in fairness to Galway, they played excellent in the second half. They got great scores, were physically stronger than us and took all the right options. We can't be blaming missing a goal and the sending off because the team that played the hurling won, simple as that. Just have to live with it."

But this loss will hurt deeply in the hurling strongholds of Cork.

"Ah, 'twas a big blow because after Limerick, we were confident we could win it. But this has happened Cork before and we can come back but it will be hard work. My own contract is two years, this is still the first year but this is not the day to be thinking about that, we'll have to sit down and think about it. There is no panic about that anyway."

That's the thing with these sort of days. They leave you with all the time in the world.

What they said: Semple Stadium reaction

'We have nothing to be going home crowing about. Cork are not the team that they used to be or that they can be and we are not going to be fooled by that.'

- Noel Lane

'We can't be blaming missing a goal and the sending off because the team that played the hurling won, simple as that.'

- Bertie Óg Murphy