Nobody was claiming the result didn't matter, but if ever there was an occasion for Cork's footballers to display a sense of perspective then the aftermath of this All Ireland qualifying defeat by Galway was it. In last week's Munster final they'd been reminded by Kerry just how painful defeat can be, yesterday they were confronted by genuine tragedy and so, as they left their dressing room at Croke Park there was little inclination for self pity.

Hours before their clash with Galway, Kieran Daly learned by phone that his brother Ian had died on Saturday night in an accident. With his club-mate Fachtna Collins, he left for home immediately to be with his family. Behind them, the pair left a group of players who not only needed to pick themselves up from defeat but, said Larry Tompkins afterwards, also desperately wanted to win the game for Kieran and his family.

Belatedly, they achieved their first goal, producing some decent football after a terribly slow start. Their second, however, was to prove beyond them even if they rattled their opponents badly with a second-half fight-back that seemed for a while as if it might earn them a memorable win. Tompkins, who declined to comment on his own position after the game, said that, while the news from home had been "very upsetting" and had put things in perspective "in a big way", he insisted nevertheless that nobody was looking for any excuses. He was, he said, "proud of every one of the lads" for their second-half performance but disappointed that they had started so "sluggishly".

"Guys on the field were making elementary mistakes, things we wouldn't normally do. We were a little lacklustre but I don't know what it was because we were certainly up for the game and I felt very good about it after last Sunday, a game we might well have won."

Nobody in the camp, in fact, could explain just how slowly they had come off the blocks, but, for most, what had proven more frustrating was the fact that they had allowed their chance to cancel out that desperately poor 20-minute spell late in the second half.

"I can't explain any of it to you," sighed Ciaran O'Sullivan. "They got off to a blistering start, we were all over the place and they were literally all over us. They were 1-7 to no score up and still we could have been further behind but we kept plugging away and at the end of it we had the chance of a draw. To come away with nothing is terribly disappointing."

Amongst the winners too there was a little bit of bewilderment about the course of what had been a particularly strange game. One thing was clear to just about everybody associated with the Galway camp, though, they're unlikely to get away with another performance like yesterday's.

"Up to now we've been playing against other sides that have lost games too and that's all very well," said John O'Mahony. "But we were poor today and that sort of performance simply won't be good enough when we start meeting the big boys in this championship.

"The way we went out of the game was the problem and I had been saying to them that we had to keep it going this time because I was aware from the last day that we died a bit as well," he said.

"We'd done so well early on but when Cork got the goal suddenly it seemed we were only four or five points in front. Football's so mobile now, the game is capable of switching so quickly and both Cork and Galway play such open football that a lead like that means nothing these days." Had they been playing Kerry or Meath yesterday, reckoned Padraig Joyce, "we'd have been beaten by seven or eight points if we'd played the way we did in the second half today."

Instead it was a Joyce free a couple of minutes from time that steadied his side's collective nerve and provided them with a base from which to drive on to victory.

"We'd had something like five wides up to then and I think if we'd gotten any of them we'd have broken their dominance beamed Ja Fallon. "It was vital that we get something by the stage he got that, though, and now I think we're all just glad to be out of it."

Fallon didn't seem sure whether the hamstring injury he picked up yesterday would clear up in time for the quarter-finals but Declan Meehan seemed more concerned about the chest pains that many of the team's supporters might have been suffering during the spell when the Galwaymen looked intent on throwing their early advantage completely away. "I'd say we gave a lot of people heart attacks out there," he chuckled, "and we're getting a lot of well-deserved stick. . . but what harm, we're into the next round and that was always the objective."