Nathaniel Atkinson has revealed his 'disappointment' in the role he played in France's second goal as Australia get ready for Tunisia.
Graham Arnold's men came up against the world champions in their World Cup opener. It was also a debut for the Hearts man and his team-mate Kye Rowles at the global tournament. A third Jambos star, Cammy Devlin, was on the bench as the Socceroos lost out 4-1. They took a shock lead but Les Blues upped the ante and showed the class at their disposal to turn the game on its head very quickly.
Atkinson - who has been a main player for Robbie Neilson - admits it was an eye opener facing Kylian Mbappe and Co but a good experience at the same time as he opened up on the experienced heads in the dressing room lifting his spirits after the game following his error in the build-up to Olivier Giroud's first of two goals.
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Speaking to Socceroos.com, the Tynecastle defender 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."
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