Every evening she's there, decked out in her Peter Schmeichel goalkeeper's kit, throwing herself on the concrete path outside her home, finger-tipping her brother's shots around the pillars they use as goalposts. You squirm as her 12-year-old body hits the cement but she gets up, dusts herself down and readies herself for the next shot.
When darkness finally forces her indoors she retires to the room that she has made a shrine to her heroes. Boyzone? "No way," she says in horror. Cantona, Giggs, Beckham and Cole wallpaper this girl's room. When she sleeps, under a Manchester United duvet, she dreams of lining out one day for the club's women's team. "I'm going to play for them, I know I am," she says.
Ask Linda Meehan to explain why there's been an upsurge in the numbers of girls following football in the 1990s, why the game is her passion and her face wrinkles up in puzzlement. She looks at you like you're some sad auld one who just doesn't understand. "How could I not love football," says her expression. "How could anyone not love football?" Linda may not realise it but, according to Anne Coddington, author of the soon to be published One Of The Lads (HarperCollins), she is part of a "sexual revolution" in football, one that has seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of women watching and playing the game worldwide.
Coddington picks out 1990 as the year the "revolution" got under way, when the World Cup Finals in Italy "heralded a new dawn for women . . . showed them a side of football that many had never seen before: they were hooked." If Gazza's tears and Gary Lineker's goals had them hooked in England, Packie Bonner's saves and David O'Leary's penalty helped alert a sizeable chunk of the female population of Ireland to the joys of the Beautiful Game.
Linda was five then and still to be convinced that football was anything but a "boring boy's game". So what changed her mind? "Television," she says. If Italia 90 whetted everyone's appetite for the game, Sky Sports provided the feast by cashing in on its soaring popularity with their live coverage of Premiership football on both English and Irish television screens. "A whole new ball game," their first advertising campaign promised, and even if the product wasn't a whole lot different to what had gone before, the presentation - and hype - was in a very different league.
For Linda's generation Sky Sports is almost a prefix for football. They've grown up with it, it's brought Giggs and Beckham, Fowler and Redknapp in to their living rooms on a daily basis and has made them stars. Not just football stars.
"I used to just watch Match Of The Day on Saturdays but then Sky Sports came and I got to see loads of matches. It was different, exciting. I suppose footballers became like pop stars then - they're in all the magazines now. David Beckham's going with Posh Spice so the two of them are everywhere. (I love him but I hate her)."
"When I first started playing football (with a local boys' team), when I was eight, I suppose it was fairly unusual. All the boys were slagging me and they wouldn't mark me . . . but then I scored." Did they mark you then? "Yeah," she grins.
"But it's not unusual for girls to like football anymore. There'd be three or four girls in my class now who would actually play football and then about half the class would follow it - half of them follow Liverpool, the other half's Man United. The rest just follow Boyzone and all that. But with all these gorgeous guys getting in to the teams girls like football more - then they start watching it and then they get more interested in the game."
The season before last I bumped in to Linda outside Old Trafford. She was paying her first visit to the home of the team she supports, Manchester United, with her mother and her brother Mark. Wide-eyed and overcome, she could hardly speak with the excitement.
"Aw, it was brilliant. You were so high up in the stand, the atmosphere, all the other people there, it was brilliant. We were singing Cantona all the time. It was huge, I didn't think it would be that big. Brilliant," she says now. (I can't remember which jersey she was wearing when I met her - she has a few. "The black one, that was my first, I have the new red one and the blue one . . . and the old red one. Oh and the black Schmeichel one as well.")
Seventeen years before that I made my first visit to Old Trafford and I can only remember seeing one other girl in the ground. There were probably many more but she stood out because she sported an Arsenal scarf (which means she probably gave up on football as a worthless pursuit soon after) and had two goals to cheer - to my none - that afternoon. We spotted each other leaving the match, both firmly attached to our nervous fathers' hands ("if you lose her don't come home," they had probably both been warned). She glared at me and I glared back. "A girl at a football match?" we said to ourselves. "Weird."
Old Trafford was a very different place when Linda first visited - according to recent research one in eight fans now attending matches in England is female. The lack of television coverage of Irish league football means the domestic game still has some catching up to do. "I wouldn't be interested in Irish football at all," says Linda. "There isn't much publicity, I mean you don't know a thing about them. They never televise the matches, except for the finals."
She knows plenty about the players of Manchester United and met one of them, Gary Pallister, after her first trip to Old Trafford. Try not to mention the name "Cantona" in her company though, it leads to heavy sighs. She finds it difficult to recount the moment, earlier this summer, when she heard Cantona was leaving Manchester United.
"We were in the car, my brother was asleep so I woke him up. It was a big shock. I was screaming. My Dad nearly crashed. I was going mad, shouting `Mark wake up, Cantona's gone.'
"I thought he'd go on for another two or three seasons, he was only 31 - Teddy Sheringham's about the same age. Gordon Strachan's 40 and he's still going, so? He left too early."
So why did he leave? "Well, we got the video about Cantona and he says at the very beginning of it that he'll keep on playing till he learns and as soon as he stops learning he'll retire." So is that what happened? "Yeah. And he was getting a lot of stick from everyone." A sigh. "No one will ever replace him. I'd love him to come back but maybe it's too late now." Another sigh.
So you want to be a goalkeeper for Manchester United's women's team? "Yeah, I'd love it." Looks a tough job to me. "Well, if you're facing a hard team it's hard, if you're facing a bad team you just stand there," she says, shrugging her shoulders.
And how high does football come in your list of favourite things? "Aw, the best. The tops." And then she's off to practice her goal-keeping some more.
"Women Thrilled By Football - Quite Under Its Sway," read the headline on a column that appeared in a 1923 edition of the Leicester Mercury, written after the author had noticed a marked increase in the number of women attending matches in England. "It indicates a great enthusiasm when people will stand for an hour and a half to witness a match, but when women will stand (as they do) for unlimited time with the rain pelting down upon their pretty clothes, ruining their hats and their comfort, it shows an interest amounting almost to heroism." If only he could see Linda's heroic goal-keeping displays on the concrete path outside her home. He'd be impressed.