Athlone Town's Pursuit of FAI Women's Cup Glory Against Galway United
Athlone’s new dynasty meets Galway’s great unanswered question
In only their seventh season as a league club, Athlone Town are already chasing history. Four FAI Women's Cup finals in a row behind them, a shot at a fifth straight on the line, and the chance to claim a third Cup in four years. This is no longer a fairy tale. It’s a power play.
Blocking the road to yet another decider is a Galway United side that have grown used to lurking near the top without yet lifting a major trophy. They’re chasing silverware on multiple fronts. What they’re really chasing, though, is a breakthrough.
A competition with ghosts
The FAI Women's Cup is officially in its 52nd year, a tournament with a roll of honour that reads like a history book and a scrapbook all at once.
Limerick’s name sits at the top, the first winners back in 1975, when they beat Civil Service 2-1 at Markets Field. That came a full 36 years before the first official women’s national league kicked off, in an era when the game lived on the margins and survived on stubbornness.
The list of past champions includes some wonderfully eccentric chapters. A club called Benfica – Waterford, not Lisbon – won three Women's FAI Cups, the last of them in 1993. A 15-year-old Ciara Grant stole the show in that final, as they swept aside College Corinthians at Kilcohan Park, then the heartbeat of Waterford football before the RSC era began.
Go back further and you find the Suffragettes, a team whose very name carried a message. They honoured the Pankhursts on the pitch as well as in spirit, winning three Cups in five seasons in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dublin Castle, fittingly, were early rulers too, taking four Cups as comfortably as their namesake once ruled the country.
Now Athlone stand on the brink of joining those faded giants, one win from drawing level with Dublin Castle’s tally and cementing their own place in the Cup’s mythology.
Athlone’s rebuild on the run
What makes Athlone’s current position more striking is how much has changed around them. They are top of the league, hunting a second straight double, but the cast list has been rewritten.
Kelly Brady, top scorer in the 2025 campaign and the match-winner in last year’s Cup final, left for Crystal Palace in the off-season and has since moved on again to Glasgow City. In goal, Megan Plaschko retired at the start of the year, handing the No. 1 jersey to Cypriot back-up Maria Matthaiou.
Plenty of teams talk about “standards” when they lose stars. Athlone have lived it.
The American core remains the engine. New Yorker Dana Scheriff, golden boot winner in 2023, returned to fill the Brady-shaped gap and has done it with ruthless efficiency: 15 league goals in 15 games. Around her, fellow imports Maddison Gibson and Alexis Strickland have driven the attack with the sort of consistency that turns good teams into serial contenders.
At the heart of it all, captain Hannah Waesch, another of the US contingent, insists the bar hasn’t dropped an inch.
"It's hard because we lost some of our key players from last year, obviously with Kelly Brady being a golden boot winner, but also we lost our starting keeper," she told RTÉ Sport. "So we lost the girl that was getting it done on our offence and the girl that was getting it done on our defence.
"We got a lot of new girls in from clubs outside Ireland and other clubs in the League of Ireland. The standard hasn't dropped in the slightest. I think just because there's a personnel change doesn't necessarily mean that our standards and expectations have."
Waesch’s own route to Athlone underlines how unlikely this story once seemed. The Texan arrived last year after college, more by chance than by design.
"The agent I was with at the time had two girls at Athlone already and so the window was slowly closing and so I was just like, yeah, let's give Ireland a go. If you've already had two [American] girls at Athlone then why not a third? So it wasn't necessarily on my radar but yeah, happy to be here."
What she found was a town and a club that don’t always get the credit they deserve.
"I feel like Athlone gets a bad rap but I like Athlone. I like how everything's within walking distance so I don't necessarily need to have a car and yeah, all the girls are in town so it's like living with all your best friends."
The adjustment from the US college system to the League of Ireland has been stark.
"It [the League of Ireland] is different, especially coming from the university level [in the US] when you've got every resource that you could possibly think of thrown at you. It's a real professional environment. Like if you are a student athlete, that is your full-time job, whereas over here a lot of the girls are part-time.
"There aren't too many full-time professional players in the League of Ireland is my understanding, and so there's, you know, girls working part-time jobs and then coming to practice late at night."
Yet amid those realities, Athlone have built a winning machine. And Galway are one of the few sides who know how to stop it.
Galway, the one team who cracked them
Back in late May, Athlone looked untouchable in the league. Then came Galway United in Terryland.
Late goals from Remini Tillotson and Niamh Farrelly flipped the script and handed Athlone their only league defeat of the season. It wasn’t a fluke. It was a statement that Galway could go toe-to-toe with the champions and land the final punch.
Galway’s own league record has one blemish, a 1-0 defeat away to Bohemians at the beginning of August. Otherwise, they’ve been typically stubborn. They sit third again, a position they have almost trademarked in recent campaigns, but crucially they hold games in hand on the teams above.
Now they stand one game from their first ever FAI Women's Cup final. For a club that has been “nearly there” for years, this feels bigger than a semi-final. It feels like a test of whether the project is finally ready to deliver.
"We're not going in as the underdogs"
Midfielder Aoibheann Donnelly is in no mood to play the plucky outsider.
"They're the champions but the last time we met we came out on top so we're not going in as the underdogs," she said.
"I think belief is probably a huge thing for us. This year, the good run we had at the start of the year really helped us and we started to get that belief and get that confidence and it just snowballed into the run of games that we had. We were unbeaten until August which is a huge achievement."
Galway’s squad has a different flavour to Athlone’s. It is built primarily on local talent from the west, framed by a few carefully chosen additions.
American duo Tillotson and Isabella Beletic add bite and athleticism. Goalkeeper Amanda McQuillan and defender/midfielder Niamh Farrelly arrived from Shelbourne, bringing top-level experience into a dressing room already packed with players from the western counties.
Donnelly, from Clarecastle, only joined in the middle of the 2025 season, but she walked into a club that had been edging upwards for years.
"I only signed mid-season last year but it's been a whole process, like it's been years in the making. They've been building something over the last number of years, I think since Phil [Trill] has come in.
"I think this year we're really close to where the club wants to be. We did well last season but there was probably a few results that we just couldn't get over the line and we're hoping to put that right this year."
Athlone chase a dynasty. Galway chase a first. One side knows how to win these games. The other has already proved they can beat the champions when it matters.
Now the question hangs over the semi-final: does history tighten Athlone’s grip on this competition, or finally loosen it just enough for Galway to break through?
