FAI Women's Cup final: When Limerick trailblazers won the first cup

Market's Field. Photo by Diarmuid Greene/Sportsfile

It is easy to forget the recent sea-change in Irish women’s soccer.

It’s only four and a half years since the national senior women’s side had to threaten strike outside Liberty Hall to be treated with due respect.

Now the team is sponsored by Sky, its World Cup qualifiers are live on RTÉ, TG4 has begun covering the WNL and Sunday’s FAI Cup final between double-chasing Shelbourne and Wexford Youths (5.30pm) is also live on TV.

But the decision to bring the women’s cup final in from the shadows and play it annually at the Aviva’, in a televised double-header with the men’s decider, was first done only eight years ago.

Truth is, two generations of Ireland’s best female footballers went unseen, especially its pioneers.

There’s some debate about when the ‘first’ women’s cup final took place, but official records place it firmly in Limerick’s legendary Markets Field in 1975, under the auspices of the first Women’s Football Association of Ireland (WFAI).

The locals won it, beating CSO Dublin (a Civil Service team) 2-1 but, like so much in women’s team sport back then, it went largely unrecorded and unheralded nationally, much like the contribution of Limerick women to Irish soccer.

Track down local trailblazers and they all point to Frank ‘Junior’ Keane.

He started girls’ football in Ballynanty, set up the Limerick Ladies Soccer League (LLSL) in 1973 and also ensured that Limerick were one of the 12 teams that contested the first Women’s League of Ireland in 1973, coaching them to win the first two WNL titles (1973-74) and the first cup.

“He had a shop where I lived and it was he who really started ladies soccer locally,” says Mary Joyce who won that first cup final at 17.

She recalls a 100-game unbeaten run with Junior’s Ballynanty kids, how Mary Gavin’s aunt literally hand-made their first set of gear and Keane borrowed kit from Wembley Rovers boys for them before they got their own white and blue strip.

Factory teams were another big driver of women’s football locally in the 1970s where clubs and inter- firms combined in a thriving local league.

Joyce worked and played for Analog Devices and companies like Krupps, EI Electronics, and De Beers also fielded strong teams.

Grainne Cross, from a famous football family of eight sisters, starred for De Beers.

She missed out Limerick’s first cup final (she was just 11 at the time) but her sisters Ann and Catherine were involved.

Grainne was a senior international at 15 and once played senior and U18 for Ireland in one day. She also spent a season in Italy with Flaminia Ambrosiana in Monza.

“Ann O’Brien was playing in Italy so I wrote to the Italian association to see if anyone was interested.

“This club wrote back, they’d done some research on me and brought me over for a week’s trial.

“I ended up staying six months and they wanted me back the next season but, to be honest, coming from a family of 12 I was very homesick, it just wasn’t for me,” recalls Cross.

Mary Joyce’s Ireland debut was against Scotland in April 1976 and she’s not even sure how many internationals she played, but she, literally, got her first cap (which credited her with 11) in the post 14 years ago.

“Ireland were playing in Limerick and someone gave us a ticket for the VIP area and my husband went over to John Delaney and said I’d never got any of my caps.

“He said a lot of their records had gone missing after a fire and then my cap just arrived in the post one day! My husband got it for me for my 50th birthday.”

Of Limerick’s historic first WFAI Cup winners, Joyce, her best friend Marion Slattery, Geraldine Grace, Mary Gavin, Marion Leahy, and Pauline Maher all played for Ireland, though not all at the same time.

Joyce played football until her early 30s and Grainne Cross lined out for Mungret into her early 40s. She also, remarkably, took up rugby, with Old Crescent, in the mid-90s and was a late call-up for Ireland in the 1998 World Cup.

Her sister Tracy (now Tracy Hoza) went to America on scholarship and still coaches soccer at Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tennessee.

And when Treaty United beat Peamount to win their historic U17 girls’ national league title a week ago, their backroom team included another Cross sister and Irish international — Rose Benson — who is still keeping the flame burning at home.

The Limerick team that day was: Fiona Skelly, Geraldine Grace, Catherine Brown, Marion Slattery, Majella Reddin, Bridget Darcy, Freda Noonan; Pauline Maher, Martha O’Reilly, Marion Leahy, Mary Joyce, Ann Cross, Mary Gavin.

FAI Women's Cup final preview: Wexford bid to halt Shels’ dream double

John Fallon

Joey Malone denied Noel King an FAI Cup triumph as manager but they’ll be unified on the Shelbourne bench tomorrow in pursuit of the women’s FAI Cup against Wexford Youths (Tallaght Stadium, 5.30pm, Live RTÉ 2).

The old sparring partners — opposing bosses when Galway shocked Shamrock Rovers in the 1991 decider — teamed up at the start of the season in a bid to break Peamount United’s dominance.

They’ve got halfway there by denying Peas a three-in-a-row of titles in last Saturday’s final day. Wexford stand in their way of a double at Tallaght Stadium.

This season, Wexford won 1-0 at Ferrycarrig Park in August before King’s Shels last week produced a narrow 3-2 win, to seal their first title since 2016.

The FAI are expecting a bumper crowd at the 7,000-capacity venue. Shels beat Wexford 5-0 in the 2016 final but Wexford bounced back to win back-to-back Cups in 2018 and 2019.

Their boss Stephen Quinn is hoping to have Ciamh Gray back from injury to solve their goalkeeper crisis. Wexford will need to be defensively tight to repel Shels’ striker Noelle Murray and her partner Saoirse Noonan, who has thrived since joining from last year’s runners-up, Cork City.