Atkinson's Aussies ready for Tunisia

The Hearts pair were starters, with Cammy Devlin on the bench, as the Aussies took the lead against the reigning world champions but the Kylian Mbappe-inspired French rallied to run out 4-1 winners.

Ready to get back on the horse, Nathaniel insists he’s already learned a lot from his World Cup bow and the Socceroos’ full focus is now on Saturday’s encounter with Tunisa.

Speaking to Socceroos.com, he said: “It’s a good experience, obviously it’s an eye opener.

“It’s good to come up against this calibre, you know what you have to work on and I know what to fix, I’ve played that scenario 50 times over and I could probably come up with 50 different solutions, but that’s football.

“I’m disappointed, I’ll take full responsibility for the second goal, but it’s time to move on from that and the beauty is I’ve got a game in three days to fix that.

“That’s the beauty of the World Cup and just tournaments in general, anything can happen, you’ve just seen what the Saudis did against Argentina.

“We’ve come up against the World Champions and there’s a reason for that, they’re a good footballing team and we can take confidence from the way that we played in that game early on.

“We’ve got a good mix of experienced players and young players and we’ve obviously got a lot of players here who are at their first World Cup.

“When I came into the changing room my head was down but the first people to come up to me was the experienced players, who talked about their experiences but they said the beauty is in three days time we’ve got another game."

Meanwhile, Finlay Pollock played 86 minutes as Scotland U19s ended their European U19s Championship qualifying campaign with a 3-1 defeat to France at Somerset Park.

Hearts teammate Liam McFarlane was an unused sub as the result, and Iceland’s win over Kazakhstan, meant that Scotland finished third in the group and do not advance to the Elite Round of qualifying.

Image courtesy of @Socceroos