IFEOMA Dieke – or Iffy as she is widely known – has been a Scotland mainstay since 2004, when she made her debut in a friendly against Greece. Now 36, the curtain will fall on her stellar international career after the Euros.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of her 117 games is that she has yet to score a goal. Nor, suggests the central defender, is that likely to change before her retirement.

“It’s going to be unlikely – I don’t go up for set-pieces,” she explains. “If it happens it happens, but I’m not counting my chickens.”

Dieke was born in Massachusetts to Nigerian parents, but suffered the culture shock of a family move to Cumbernauld when she was three. There was also a spell in Norwich, setting the tone for a nomadic senior footballing career alternating between the United States and Sweden with a loan spell in Cyprus thrown in.

The quick and tactically astute central defender was, along with Kim Little, one of only two Scots who played for Team GB at the London Olympics. Although that ended badly with an anterior cruciate ligament knee injury in the second match against Cameroon, she lists the 2012 tournament as a major career highlight.

Another was her century of caps, which arrived in the second leg of the World Cup play-off against Holland in 2014. “International football was a bonus for me and I never thought I’d reach 100 games,” she says.

She names Carol Wilson as the biggest influence on her career. “She was my first coach,” the Vittsjo defender says.

“She was the one who spotted me at school when I was young and super shy and told me about Cumbernauld Cosmos.

“That was probably my longest spell with a club – six or seven years. Nobody in my family played football, but there was something about the game that resonated with me.”

Dieke, who was a decade ahead of her time in having played professionally throughout her career, lists a Scotland game as a low point.

It was one of the major championship near misses – the first game of the Euro 2009 play-off against Russia at Tynecastle.

She did manage to find the net – but at the wrong end.

“I took that one hard personally,” she says. “It hit off my shin, and for me that was the one that knocked us out because it was an away goal. I was beating myself up quite a bit for that.”

Unlike her school days, nobody could accuse Dieke of being super shy now. Superstitious, perhaps. She leans over to touch wood when asked about finally reaching the Euros.

“I’ve played for Scotland all these years and finally we’re there,” she says after giving her knuckles a bashing. “It means everything. We’ve been close so many times and this is the icing on the cake for my Scotland career for sure.”