World Cup qualifying: Cook Islands manager on Russia 2018, FIFA rankings - and giant insects

The road to Russia 2018 was mapped out in full for all members of the FIFA family at the Preliminary Draw at St Petersburg's Konstantin Palace.

For a few countries, that road is already closed. Zimbabwe and Indonesia broke rules and were excluded from qualifying; there have been six first-round casualties in Asia, and 17 have fallen in the CONCACAF zone thus far.

However, for the rest of FIFA's 209 affiliated nations, their paths towards the hosts' 2018 summer party are now signposted. Pots, procedures, play-off pairings (plus the inevitable padding and awkward pauses) and then, in a little over two years' time, the big fish and the best battlers will have made it through to the finals.

Sometimes, the small fry get there - Trinidad & Tobago are the tiniest qualifiers to date in terms of size and population, having played on the grand stage at Germany 2006. But while the Soca Warriors were World Cup minnows, the FIFA scale shrinks much further still - and in the Pacific region in particular, you can find much of world football's equivalent of plankton.

T&T has a population of about 1.3million. The Cook Islands, lying 1,600 miles north-east of New Zealand, has less than 15,000. Ranked 207th in the world, they currently represent just a flicker on the Russia 2018 radar, but success is relative - and their coach Drew Sherman genuinely believes his players can punch above their weight in the Oceania region.

Sherman - a 28-year-old Welshman with an impressive academy coaching background in the UK - took the top job in Cook Islands football four months ago and in August, his World Cup adventure begins in earnest. Sky Sports caught up with him this week to discuss what appears to be the most colossal of challenges...

Drew, yours seems a very unusual career move - for starters, it's at least 10,000 miles in terms of distance. What was the crucial factor in you accepting the Cook Islands job?

Gaining experience was the motivation. I was very fortunate back home - I managed Aldershot's academy, and then worked with some great young players at Southampton - but it was always going to be a tough transition to step into first-team football. Where do you gain that experience, unless you leave? It becomes a common theme, because employing a young coach is a gamble for any chairman. So I decided to do something different, by getting involved in World Cup qualifying.

Of all the roads to Russia, the Cook Islands' must be among the most difficult...

For World Cup qualifying in Oceania, we enter at the first-round stage which is a four-team round-robin tournament in Tonga (31 August to 5 September). We'll play three games in five days and we have to finish above the hosts, Samoa and American Samoa in order to reach next summer's OFC Nations Cup, which also serves as the second-round stage. There is then a third round where teams are divided into two groups, the winners of which meet in a two-legged final. The best team in Oceania must then play a team from another FIFA confederation to reach the World Cup finals.

And how would you describe the state of Cook Islands football currently?

Before anything else, you have to understand football is still a developing sport in the region. There are tribes in Papua New Guinea who have not even had any society contact them, let alone football. Also, we're tiny in comparison with the other nations nearby, so it's very difficult for us to even compete in Oceania. And our talent pool is spread out, because we have a big problem with depopulation - 15,000 on the islands, but 70,000 odd Cook Islanders in New Zealand, and another 15,000 in Australia.

For the current national team, we have about 45% of the squad based here, the same again in NZ and then 10% in Australia. Having domestic-based players is hugely important. Rugby league is very popular and well-supported in the Cook Islands but football is a bigger participation sport, because it caters for both genders. If we've not got domestic players making up our national team, growing the game here becomes very difficult for us to do.

So what's been your approach so far to this immense challenge?

We've worked really hard on identifying talent, and trying to develop a network that hasn't really been in place beforehand. If you look at the squad we're taking to Tonga, it's new and young - I think we only average about two caps per player. We identified the better players based on the islands - they tend to come from traditional football backgrounds and families. Often they'll have a parent or grandparent that's European who came over. In New Zealand, there are a lot of second and third generation Cook Islanders, so we've worked closely with the federations and states there and in Australia to help identify players who could be eligible for us. Due to resources, they keep much better records than we have done previously, and we've been able to tap into that. Football's a people business and if you don't use the connections, you don't get very far.

We had a selection camp, and then two training camps in Auckland where we've developed a playing style and worked on cohesion. It's very difficult, when we've got players spread all over the Pacific, to get that group to come together as a team. The distances are so vast.

What are the players like to work with, and what’s your background and philosophy as a coach?

The players are very happy people and willing to learn and develop. They'll do almost anything that you ask them to do. That's very different from my previous coaching experience in the UK!

I got my UEFA A Licence at 21 with the FA of Wales, having started at 16. For me, since then, it's been a broad spectrum of different types of coaching for the last 12 years. It's certainly been easier dealing with first-team players here than with, for example, Under-8s. If you've put on a bad session, an Under-8 will tell you straight away - they won't sugar the pill!

I'm now doing my AFC Pro Licence with Football Australia - I'm due to finish that midway through next year. I'd have liked to have done the UEFA one through the FAW, but it's a bit of a commute...

The (Cook Islands) players are very happy people and willing to learn and develop. They'll do almost anything that you ask them to do.

As for my philosophy, I'm a firm believer in the principles of 'Tactical Periodization' [a training methodology that originated in Portugal which seeks to improve all-round game intelligence, both offensively and defensively]. A coach has to try to maximise the potential of every individual in order to bring their playing model to life. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are the world's best players because they strive to learn and get better - those are the type of individuals that win you games.

Back in Surrey, I have my own coaching business called Pro Way Academy, which was founded on the importance of opportunity. If you provide young players with opportunity, you develop hope - and more than that, you foster a belief that they'll play in the first team, because of the number of players that it's happened to previously. That's Southampton's biggest selling point and the secret of their success. Having that pathway in place is the most important thing in football, and Pro Way has been very successful in terms of getting players into professional clubs. Here, in the Cook Islands, it's a similar idea - providing an opportunity for players to flourish.

How do you think you'll get on at that first stage on the road to Russia - the four-nation tournament in Tonga?

We aim to win it. We've invested a lot of time and money, and the president of the Cook Islands FA (CIFA) will be the first to tell you he expects to go through! But it's never happened before. We've just sent our women away to the Pacific Games (in Papua New Guinea) and they won bronze, which is great. But we can't afford to send both our women's and our men's team to the Pacific Games - certainly not in the same year as World Cup qualifying. And not getting games under your belt makes it even harder... that's why of the 11 federations associated to OFC, nine of them are 188th or below in the world rankings. Flying even from here to Tahiti, which is the closest other Pacific island, is a very expensive flight. We have to go via New Zealand to get there.

Tonga have an advantage, being hosts. The hot climate will be tricky - for our boys based in New Zealand, they'll have been playing in the cold for three months, so we have to be careful about the style of football we ask them to play. Samoa have pedigree as a rugby nation, but also heroes that have helped develop football there. Tim Cahill is of Samoan descent, and also Bill Tuiloma (Marseille's New Zealand international defensive midfielder) - they've been catalysts for Samoan football. We go in as outsiders, but that's good - we can surprise people.

You mentioned the Pacific Games. There was a lot of worldwide media coverage surrounding the Micronesia team, after they conceded 114 goals in three games in the men's football tournament. A petition has been started in an attempt to help them gain FIFA affiliation. What does being a FIFA member nation mean to somewhere like the Cook Islands?

It's everything. Without the affiliation and funding, we wouldn't be able to afford to run any projects, or take any teams to play in tournaments. It does make you feel for countries waiting to be affiliated, like Micronesia. FIFA get a lot of bad press, but you can't doubt that in terms of the money coming down to smaller nations, they really do grow the game in places where it otherwise wouldn't happen. Look at it geographically. Our islands cover 2.2m sq km of ocean - the size of Western Europe - and our biggest land mass, Rarotonga, has a circumference of 30km. In that respect, Micronesia are similar to us - when CIFA was established in 1971, the team lost 30-0 to Tahiti in their first game. But since becoming a part of the FIFA family in 1994, football has grown massively here. Our infrastructure is fantastic - we've got a national stadium here, with two good pitches. We've got accommodation for 36 people to house a national academy, and funding which allows us to bring the players together.

It's a real Catch-22 for Micronesia. If they're going to invest in facilities, they need FIFA's money - but they can't get it until they're part of FIFA. It'll be very difficult for them to develop otherwise. Those Pacific Games results have made the world sit up and take notice, although it's bad for the region when it takes something like that to gain media coverage, because Oceania football is improving. Look at the evidence - Fiji won a group game at the U20 World Cup last month; New Zealand only narrowly lost to Portugal in the last 16; and a couple of weeks ago, Tahiti reached the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup final (losing 5-3 to hosts Portugal). The sport is developing, despite what the rankings might suggest.

What's your opinion of the FIFA rankings then? Your homeland Wales are top 10, but your team is 207th...

You take them with a pinch of salt! In Oceania currently, New Zealand are 136th, New Caledonia are 167th and the rest are way down. But that's purely down to the fact we only play games every four years. If you don't play games, you don't move up the rankings. However, when you talk about growing the game, they're crucial. The men's rankings are often referenced and they put a dampener on any success we might have as an FA. We try not to pay too much attention to them, but we know that until we improve our ranking, we can't get the association to where we want it to be.

Finally, how's life away from the training pitch? Is it paradise on earth?

Everywhere you look it's like a postcard, and there's a proud cultural heritage too - we had to understand that and the environment before we put any plans in place. The 'wildlife' has made it interesting - last week, my fiancée had a bit of a shock getting into bed to find that there was a giant centipede under the blanket with her! Another time, I found a huge huntsman spider in the shower - in both cases, we were out of there pretty quickly!

'Not hanging around to see why they call it a huntsman spider!'

At the moment, it's actually the whale migration season. We were sitting outside the other day and just looking out to sea and suddenly there were four humpback whales breaching out of the water past the reef. It's an incredible place - a world away from southern England, that's for sure.

Follow Drew on Twitter at @DrewCSherman. For more information on the Cook Islands FA, visit www.cookislandsfootball.com. For young players seeking opportunity in the South of England, visit www.prowayacademy.com and follow @ProWayAcademy on Twitter.