Peters has over 100 caps for her country and has been involved with three World Cup squads, however admits she has never seen a Matildas team better than the one Australia has witnessed in 2017.

Sam Kerr has been the talk of the town after her stellar year, now the Matildas now carry the expectation of winning the 2018 Asian Cup in Jordan and the 2019 World Cup in France.

A number of current Matildas including Kerr, Kyah Simon and Elise Kellond-Knight believe this is the strongest Australia has been in women’s football.

But the former Newcastle Jets midfielder said the Matildas need to learn from the Socceroos’ weakening after 2010.

“Is it a golden generation? Because golden usually means it’s only going to happen once,” Peters told FourFourTwo.

“If we’re going to say they’re the golden generation, we’ve got to learn from the Socceroos’ post-golden generation and how they’ve gone down a long way.

“We should actually be able to convert this golden generation into a continuing world dominance of football. There’s no reason we can’t, look at the players coming through, there’s quality there.

“We’ve got to use this generation and the Socceroos are the example where we didn’t do anything - we just accepted that was the golden generation, it was a fluke and the next generation will be crap again, well no, it doesn’t have to be like that.

“Maybe individual players like Sam come once in a lifetime, but we’ve got 20 players out there who are world class players who you play in a World Cup and would perform. It’s more the depth that will last long-term.”

Peters in the 2007 World Cup camp with coach Tom Sermanni

Peters also said a key to building a good succession plan is to refrain from throwing young players into the Matildas too early.

The 38-year-old told FourFourTwo in July that she thought trialling kids was a disservice to the game.

She used herself as an example when she had a knee reconstruction as a teenager.

“It’s far too easily accepted in our culture and women’s football,” she said.

“There’s an opportunity here to be successful when this golden generation has gone, we just need to manage the succession plan very well.

“We have a (15-year-old) Kyra Cooney-Cross who’s the next best player in the world, we’ve got to look after her because if we make her drop out of school like Ellie (Carpenter), start smashing her body too early, then we’re actually wasting longevity for the players.

“I just think there’s a better way. For example if the golden generation was ahead of me and I was held back because there was such a good team, the coach could say ‘OK I’m not going to play Joey at 17, I’m going to keep playing our players in their prime like Clare Polkinghorne’. Then at 20, ‘oh, we’ve just saved Joey from all the hardships of being a professional athlete, living in a bubble of training’.

“Leave the kids alone right now, let’s enjoy this generation. They’re hopefully going to go far at this upcoming World Cup, but even the next and hope we can get one more.

“You could hope you can get another four-year-cycle out of this team. That means you’ve got another eight years to a decade to then make sure we have players coming through that are just as good as them.”