Micheál Donoghue happy with response to last week's bum note

Galway manager Micheál Donoghue said he was happy with his side's performance in their bounce-back win over Kilkenny in Nowlan Park but stressed his priority was developing the squad in time for championship.

The westerners entered today smarting from last weekend's heavy home defeat to Tipperary, which turbo-changed the talk of transition and a possible fallow period, but they were a different beast from the off this afternoon, Portumna corner forward Declan McLoughlin burying a goal with their first score of the game.

Leading 1-11 to 0-10 at the break, they built on that advantage in the third quarter and when McLoughlin fired home his second goal on the rebound in the 47th minute, they established an eight-point lead.

That was Kilkenny's cue for a relentless surge, the Cats hitting 1-06 without reply, Eoin Cody's goal concluding the sequence to push them one point ahead with seven minutes remaining.

However, from there, Galway found another wind, Jason Flynn landing three frees and Conor Whelan floating over the final point to assure them of the points.

"We're very happy with it," Donoghue admitted to RTÉ Sport. "Disappointed with the performance we had last week at home and obviously we were looking for a response. For the last few weeks, training had gone really well and maybe our performance last week didn't illustrate that.

"We went back this week, worked really hard on the training ground and they transferred that onto the pitch today."

As to the fade-out in the middle of the second half, when their eight-point lead was wiped out, Donoghue reckoned his players would benefit from the experience.

"There was probably one or two mistakes but no better team than Kilkenny to exploit them. When you get into that situation and