The last stanza was played out to cheers for Souttar’s headers, and goalkeeper/captain Mat Ryan’s take from a corner. Ryan can’t get a game for Copenhagen FC. Now he’ll be barred anyway.

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Strains of Land Down Under and Waltzing Matilda rang out in Doha, and this time it was not in an expats bar, but a World Cup stadium.

In the group hug after beating Tunisia, Graham Arnold’s message had been that they had won nothing yet. Now they have, and so did his message. “Let’s go one more,” he urged. If they’d heard it in Fed Square, they’d have shouted: “Encore.”

Some context, not for sobriety’s sake. Australia’s World Cup goals are necessarily interim and modest. As a nation, we’ve had to condition ourselves to this. A place in the World Cup finals, a goal, a win, “getting out of the group”. That’s a humble phrase that’s taken on the guise of a grail.

Winning two games in a row, getting out of the group more than once, getting out of the group in style, knocking off top 10 opposition: Tick them all off. All this night. Actually, sobriety can take a back seat, even in Doha.

Australia has no hope of winning the World Cup, so it has to be about winning at the World Cup. To be fair, that’s true for about two-thirds of the countries here. The world game is ever-broadening, but its summit remains unreachably high. So this is already a deceptively worthy achievement. Who would dare to predict what comes next?

Maybe this, that there’s a new minimum threshold. Australia’s accomplishments in its World Cup history arrive so far apart that each new assault feels like starting again. That’s how it felt to Arnold when he took the reins after the last World Cup in 2018.

We’re Sisyphus, always back at the bottom. And pinned there. Arnold tacitly admitted this when he read the world’s media a short tutorial on the hierarchy of football codes in Australia.

It means that Arnold’s right when he says that the Socceroos and Matildas are the only teams to unite the nation – we love nothing more than to disport ourselves on the world stage – but he’s also right that they do it on a base as thin as icing. Australia as a nation overplays the underdog card, but in the case of the Socceroos, it is apt.

All tournament, Arnold has preached a message so simple it sounded simplistic. One team, Australian DNA, you know the drill. He’ll hate this, but it was the message of an old-fashioned AFL coach. On the world stage, it sounded too thin, overcooked.

What would mere kitchen hands know?

Arnold’s Socceroos took the cake. For all they knew, 0-0 would have been enough, but that’s not how they played it – nor how it played out after Tunisia stunned France. Instead, they won by winning. The scoreline was the icing.

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