Prior to the Lowy-led revolution of the game in 2003, having your heart broken by a cruel, savvier football world came every few years.

Go back to Mario Zagallo’s Kuwait in 1977; the Kiwis four years later; Sir Alex’s Scots in 1985; the conniving Israel in 1989; Maradona’s Argentina and Khodadad Aziz’s Iran in the 1990s and Uruguay in 2001.

As national team fans, we felt like the kid who got pushed around at school. Time and time again.

Just a litany of glorious World Cup failures.Then it changed over the last five or six years with successive World Cup qualifications and backing from corporations high and mighty.

So last Friday morning’s drawn out envelope-opening charade hosted by the seemingly avuncular Sepp Blatter – who’s clearly taken his speech cues from Rob Oakeshott – while gutting, can’t hurt those who’ve lived through the dark days.  

As for reasons why, au.fourfourtwo.com’s editor Kevin Airs is bang on the money when he says it was a confluence of factors that contributed to our tally of just one vote and an embarrassing first round knockout.

You can't just blame Australia's fluffy animated video featuring "Scooby-Roo" or just the money-hungry bid consultants who contributed sweet FA (or is that sweet FFA?) when it really mattered.

FIFA’S voting system, the relationships between various associations and members and the ability of nations like Qatar to cleverly splash their petro-cash – and bags of it – in a targeted way are obvious reasons that Australia never understood till it was too late.  

Then there’s the Australian bid itself – clean but lacking a football spine, ruthlessness, persuasiveness, know-how and more than a bit naive of key FIFA processes, culture and relationships.

And as for presentations, well, England’s was top-drawer - actually superb and something to be proud of - but did that help them? They only got one more vote than Australia. Extraordinary.

What we’ve also learnt is FIFA technical evaluation reports are a costly irrelevance and a charade. Not one ExCo member took any notice of what were excellent assessments – and if you didn’t notice, Qatar was listed as a “high risk” due to the blisteringly hot weather.

FIFA’s mantra is “For The Good Of The Game” – now Qatar have the weighty responsibility of proving FIFA’s own technical report is completely wrong - and that hundreds of thousands of fans enjoy a world class cultural and sporting event in 2022 (although the likelihood is of hanging around air-conned lobbies in nice hotels in Doha bored shitless in between games). 

Meanwhile, our game goes on. Next month, you can bet 80 billion riyals the Socceroos will be highly motivated to make a point at the 2011 AFC Asian Cup to be played at the home of FIFA’s 2022 World Cup. Qatar's Mohammed bin Hammam will present the winner’s trophy, too.

Barely 18 hours after a stunned Hassan Al-Thawadi spoke about Qatar making history, the A-League turned on a stunner between Brisbane Roar and Melbourne Victory.

At the same time, FFA Chairman Frank Lowy spoke about  crushing defeat in Zurich and the "turbo charge" a World Cup would've given.

He wants to continue to strengthen our game and keep pushing forward no matter how disappointed we may feel.

It's the only way we know how.