Aiming to subject their Oceanic counterparts to more misery on the football field, England welcome Australia to Wembley for an international friendly on Friday evening.
The men's clash concludes a double-header of friendlies between the two nations, as the corresponding women's clash in April saw the Lionesses lose their first game under Sarina Wiegman before completing their revenge mission with a 3-1 World Cup semi-final win.
Tied at 1-1 in the hypothetical best-of-three series, England will follow Friday's friendly with a repeat of their Euro 2020 final with Italy in qualifying for the 2024 Championships, while Graham Arnold's team have a date with New Zealand pencilled in for next Tuesday.
Ahead of this week's fascinating battle, Sports Mole takes an in-depth look at the head-to-head record between the Three Lions and the Socceroos.
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Yet to meet in a competitive setting, England and Australia will lock horns for the eighth time in friendly circumstances this week, and the Three Lions unsurprisingly lead the way in the head-to-head charts with four successes compared to just one for the Socceroos.
Another two contests between the two far-apart nations - who lie 9,500 miles away from each other - have ended with the spoils shared, and low-scoring affairs have been commonplace, with eight goals for England and six for Australia at an average of two per game.
The Sydney Cricket Ground hosted the maiden meeting between England and Australia in 1980, where the Three Lions - then under the wing of Ron Greenwood - came up trumps 2-1 thanks to a pair of first-half strikes from Glenn Hoddle and Paul Mariner.
That narrow triumph marked the start of a five-game unbeaten run for England against the Socceroos, who welcomed the Three Lions to the other side of the globe on all five occasions, including a run of three successive friendlies within the space of a week in June 1983.
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Two of those encounters would end level either side of a 1-0 win for Sir Bobby Robson's team, who had Paul Walsh to thank for their slender success at the Suncorp Stadium, and another eight years would pass before England visited Australian territory again, where they triumphed by the same scoreline in 1991 thanks to an Ian Gray own goal.
Current Socceroos head coach Arnold was deployed in a two-man attack with Aurelio Vidmar in that game, but his powers proved ineffective on home soil, and not until 2003 would England finally enjoy a home fixture against Australia at Upton Park.
The Socceroos scored just two goals in their first five friendlies with England, but they bettered that tally in just 90 minutes at the Boleyn Ground, where Anthony Popovic, Harry Kewell and Brett Emerton netted in a famous 3-1 win for the AFC nation, as Sven-Goran Eriksson made 11 half-time changes to no avail.
Another 13 years would pass before the men's teams faced off again, with current Premier League head coaches Roy Hodgson and Ange Postecoglou in the opposing dugouts, and the former would leave the Stadium of Light the happier man on a record-breaking 2016 evening.
Eric Dier diverted the ball into his own net in the second half, by which England had already struck through Wayne Rooney and Marcus Rashford, whose third-minute effort saw him become the youngest-ever Three Lions player to score on his debut at 18 years and 209 days - a record which still stands today.
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Ben Knapton
