Risdon and Behich look set to stay in the squad until better alternatives show up while Leckie, Rogic, Sainsbury, Mat Ryan and Aaron Mooy will remain the foundation for the future.

Which just leaves the striker’s role and the perennial headache for Australian coaches for years now, despite the false dawns of the Asian Cup and the first round of World Cup qualification.

Nabbout and Juric offer nothing new, Dimi Petratos failed to impress in training at Russia 2018 while the case for Maclaren is made at length above.

Beyond that though it’s hard to see where we look to next in the short-term. Adam Taggart is a possibility if he can maintain fitness and step up to the next level, but he’s not the young hope he was.

And that’s where thelong-term problem lies. There is no pathway for young strikers in Australia.

In the A-League, strikers are so pivotal to a team’s success, clubs will invest their marquee money and top salary cap wages on attracting overseas talent Down Under to deliver goals and finals spots.

It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are no great Australian strikers in the A-League because there are no (or at least very few) Australian strikers in the A-League.

The Y-League is no pathway as it only provides a laughably short season. The AIS no longer exists and few A-League clubs look at the striking talent in NPL clubs (which is often admittedly made up of discarded former A-League and Y-League players).

So the issue is not Bert being stubborn, or team formations or structures. It’s not even personalities. It’s actual deep-rooted infrastructure.

A short-term fix might be to bring in Maclaren and adapting our playing style to suit his if that brings results.

But more importantly on a bigger scale, it is a series of fundamental problems with football’s infrastructure in Australia that need to be addressed.

Until we do, we simply cannot progress to the next level.