JOHN MCGINN is confident Scotland will improve for their European Championship experience as they set their sights on the World Cup next summer.
Steve Clarke's side saw their campaign come to a premature end as a 3-1 defeat to Croatia denied them a place in the knockout stages of the tournament.
McGinn is one of the players that Scotland will build their squad around in coming years and the Aston Villa midfielder knows the national side will regroup and go again after their Hampden heartache.
McGinn said: “Just devastated that we’re not through. Obviously extremely proud of the effort throughout the whole campaign.
“We didn’t get off to the best of starts and tonight we came up against a really good team and their experience in tournaments showed in the end.
“They are an excellent team. We knew that. We were ignoring all the noise that they were an ageing team and they were slow.
“They weren’t tonight. They were experienced and they have got one of the best players in the world in Luka Modric.
“We did lose goals at poor times but the main thing that we have got to do is use this experience to drive us on to go to more tournaments and the World Cup is our aim now.
“You look around the dressing room, we have got a good age group and determined guys. We feel as though we didn’t do ourselves justice, but what we did do is create history in coming here and we want this to be the start not the end.
“The manager touched on that, we need to learn from this experience. We are not used to it and we can’t get away from that but we need to become a nation that is used to it, become braver and better.
“We can improve, of course we can. You can see tonight there are areas where we can improve but we have got the talent and got the talent coming through."
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