We are one step short of something genuinely unique in Welsh women’s football, but standing in our path is a team that showed in the semi-final that they are perfectly capable of denying us on Saturday, and are certainly used to winning!

Riga¹are only in their third season of existence, but they are already established as Latvia’s strongest club by some distance. A couple of players’ stories illustrate the extent of their domestic dominance: teenage goalkeeper Elza Strazdiņa not only won the goalkeeper of the season award for the league last season, but she also established herself as the national number one and her team were comfortable enough to throw her on up front for the game in which they clinched the league, an 8-0 derby win. In 24 league games, just three goals were conceded, while a staggering 180 goals were scored. Anyone fancy ending the season with a goaldifference of +177?

Strazdiņa has moved on now though, to play in the Swedish top division, as has phenomenal American striker Alexxis Lipsey. For her, last season can reasonably described as utterly ludicrous! She gave warning in 2024 when she arrived half way through the season and still finished as second top scorer. In 2025, with a full programme of matches to full her boots in, she did just that. The figures speak for themselves: 80 shots; 56 goals; 60 in all competitions! Unsurprisingly, that was a record for the Latvian League!

In their first season they won the league with a remarkable record of 19 wins and 1 loss in a 21-game season. That was nothing though: in the following two seasons they won every league match of the campaign, and they are currently equal top of the league with a perfect record after 11 matches, sharing top spot with a side which has played two games more. They haven’t dropped a point since a 1-0 home loss in July 2024, and are currently on a run of 47 consecutive league wins!

Oh, they’re the cup holders too.

Last season was their first in European competition, and they entered at the stage we are at now. They won their first match impressively, beating seeded Maltese side Flora 4-1 with Kumba Brima scoring all four: more of her later! They didn’t win the final though, losing 2-1 to hosts Racing Union despite another Brima goal which brought the game level in the second half.

Brima continued her remarkable Champions League form, with two goals in the semi-final against Glentoran on Wednesday and forced an own goal which might have been going in if Sophie Keenan hadn’t intervened. A Sierra Leonean international, the 24-year old was twice top scorer in their domestic league before travelling east.

Another outstanding player against Glentoran was Miyu Takahira, who was a constant threat down the left. She has one international cap, won four years ago, and signed for Riga at the start of the month, having previously played a season in Denmark for Fortuna Hjørring. Arriving at the same time, direct from Japan, was Wakana Mitani, and the duo took the number of Japanese players at Riga to five, all of whom started on Wednesday.

Shiori Katō arrived in April from Helsinki, following in the footsteps of Minami Ōi, who has extensive experience in north-eastern Europe. Natsumi Taketa won the Latvian division’s defender of the year award in her first season, and was also impressive in 2025. Her thoughtful and revealing blog explains how the club has looked to develop in its early years, throttling back on the number of foreign imports last season but clearly deciding to reverse that policy for this Champions League campaign. It also explains how she struggled for a spell last season as she tried to cope with a bad concussion and the pressure of being made captain despite being able to speak very little Latvian.

Further international exports are from south-eastern Europe and beyond. Milana Rahimova was outstanding at the back against Glentoran and is an Azerbaijan international. Indeed, she represented her North Macedonian club, Ljuboten, in this stage of the Champions League against our first opponents, Pyunik, last season, playing in a 4-0 win. That took them through to the nextstage, where they lost both games 5-0. Hava Mustafa is an Azerbaijan international who also arrived from Ljuboten: she scored all four goals against Pyunik to boot!

Seventeen-year old goalkeeper Aleksandra Torgosova and eighteen-year old right wing back Liva Steinberga are both Latvian Under-19 internationals who started in a 3-1 home defeat to Wales in a European Championship qualifier last April.

1. Just a point of order, as I’ve gone all pedantic lately: UEFA and Google call them Dinamo Riga. That is a completely different team which doesn’t exist any more. ↩︎