By Eanna O’Reilly

AHEAD of the Galway hurlers showdown with Offaly in round two of the Leinster championship on Saturday evening (O’Connor Park Tullamore, 6:30pm) team manager Michéal Donoghue was hoping his players would get last weekend’s heavy defeat to Kilkenny out of their system as soon as possible and be ready for their next test in Tullamore.

‘‘Look, we have no time to feel sorry for ourselves,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ll have to get focused on our recovery and get back training on Tuesday night. We have to immediately get focused on next weekend now.’’

‘‘We’re obviously disappointed [after the defeat to Kilkenny] but look, it’s a quick turnaround and we’ll have to push on now and be ready for the weekend. We’re going to need a massive performance [against Offaly] on Saturday. We’ll review the Kilkenny game and take it from there.’’

The Galway boss wasn’t making any excuses for the team’s poor display against the Cats at Nowlan Park. Donoghue made no attempt to dress up the 12-point defeat and admitted that it fell a long way short of the standard which the current group of players expects from themselves.

‘‘We know first and foremost that it [the performance] is not acceptable. Our performance was not what we expected. I thought in the first quarter of the game that we weren’t too bad. But we made some individual and collective mistakes and Kilkenny pounced on that and they went in at half time six points ahead and deservedly so.

‘‘In the second half, we were chasing the game and when you turn ball over like we did and leave yourself open at the back, we got punished for it. We’ll take ownership of that and accept that it wasn’t good enough.’’

Donoghue felt that the level of preparation and the training form displayed by the Galway players leading into the first round of the championship gave no indication that the team would perform poorly, or fail to fire in so many areas, as they did last Saturday in Nowlan Park.

‘‘It [the performance] didn’t reflect our training form, but equally, we didn’t transfer what we’ve been doing on the training ground into the match situation today. I thought we started well, but look, the first goal [conceded by Galway] was a mistake. After that, Kilkenny just punished us at every opportunity.’’

Pictured: Galway’s Cianan Fahy on the run against Martin Keoghan of Kilkenny during the Leinster Senior Hurling Championship at Nowlan Park on Saturday. Photo: David Cunniffe.