A mix of anxiety and excitement is usually in order before Australia begins a World Cup qualification quest.

But there’s no point pretending otherwise – many fans will be nervous when the Socceroos start their next campaign in June.

In that phase of qualifiers for Russia 2018, there is little to gain except possible humiliation.

Tomorrow night, a draw in Kuala Lumpur will decide which countries the Socceroos will face in a group of five. Asia’s top eight teams will be kept apart in the draw so Australia will be expected to win the group.

Failure to win it might result in early elimination from the World Cup.

In previous World Cups the leading teams in our region didn’t have to enter the race until there were 20 teams left in the Asian qualifiers. There was some potential for embarrassing losses but it was mostly accepted that playing many of those countries, especially away from home, was no walk in the park.

This time, however, the Asian Football Confederation has thrown the top countries into a 40-team series consisting of eight groups of five. Only six Asian teams have been eliminated thus far.

In World Cup qualifiers, Australia hasn’t faced teams as lowly as some of those that await for 10 years. That’s when membership of Oceania meant several matches against small Pacific countries.

There was much fanfare two months ago when Football Federation Australia announced the Socceroos would begin their qualifying campaign in Perth, where they haven’t played for a decade.

What wasn’t acknowledged was that the game in WA will be against the lowest ranked opponent in the Socceroos’ group. It could be Guam, which Australia defeated 9-0 a few years ago despite not using overseas-based players.

Nevertheless, the rest of the group could be littered with banana skins.

Tomorrow’s draw will divide the 40 teams into five pots. Asia’s best eight teams (according to FIFA rankings) go into Pot 1, the next best eight go in Pot 2 and so on. Each group will have one country from each pot.

Pot 1: Iran, Japan, Korea Republic, Australia, UAE, Uzbekistan, China, Iraq.

Pot 2: Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, Vietnam, Syria, Kuwait.

Pot 3: Philippines, Palestine, Maldives, Thailand, Tajikistan, Lebanon, India.

Pot 4: Timor-Leste, Kyrgyzstan, North Korea, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Bhutan.

Pot 5: Malaysia, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Yemen, Guam, Laos, Cambodia, Chinese Taipei.

Unless you’re an Asian soccer nerd, the type who was following Bhutan’s epic qualifying triumph over Sri Lanka (guilty, Your Honour), it won’t be obvious that the pots aren’t well balanced.

Pot 1 is straightforward as those were the eight teams that reached the quarter-finals of January’s Asian Cup. Pot 2 has six of the other eight countries that were in Australia for that tournament.

It’s the lower pots that aren’t quite right and that’s partly because of the way FIFA rankings work. Teams are rewarded for wins but receive nothing for losses no matter how strong the opponents are. Country A might be better than Country B but if Country B plays a lot of matches against weaker opposition and keeps winning, while Country A keeps losing to top ranked sides, B will be ranked ahead of A.

A lot of the lesser teams in Asia are frequently inactive. That doesn’t help.

Pot 5 is weak but it does include Yemen, a recent improver good enough to record draws with Bahrain and Qatar just weeks before those teams competed in this year’s Asian Cup.

North Korea is the team everyone will want to avoid in Pot 4 and that has nothing to do with global politics. When the North Koreans get their act together, they can be one of Asia’s best as they showed by reaching the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa.

Even if Australia doesn’t get drawn with Yemen or North Korea (or both), away matches against other lowly teams could involve playing in unfamiliar places, perhaps on bumpy pitches, with an opposition using all 11 players to defend desperately in front of its raucous crowd.

And none of that will be an excuse for failure.

The other difficulty all the top countries face is that only 12 teams will be left in the World Cup race after this phase of qualifying ends. The eight group winners advance to the next round along with the four best runners up.

Five of the teams in Pot 2 have been good enough to beat the Socceroos in past encounters. A repeat in this series could be calamitous.

These qualifiers will also be a novelty for Australia’s coach, Ange Postecoglou. Oddly, he has never taken charge of the Socceroos in a qualification match. The team had already booked its spot in the 2014 World Cup before his appointment and then, as the host nation, Australia didn’t have to qualify for the Asian Cup.

There is a big difference between qualifiers and tournament play. The latter allows you to get your squad together weeks in advance and that means better preparation and planning. Postecoglou thrives in those conditions.

For qualifiers, national teams are only able to get players released by their clubs a few days before games. That leaves little time to train and work on formations and tactics.

So how nervous is Postecoglou?

This is what he said last week: “We want to qualify, but we want to go there (Russia) and do some damage. Scare a few countries and try and win the thing. That might sound ridiculous sitting here right now, but that should be our goal, to try and win the World Cup.”

I love his positivity and no doubt it has contributed to what he’s achieved as a coach.

But I can never quite shake off the pessimism built by following Australia through five consecutive World Cup qualification failures (that’s 20 years!) even if they were followed by three straight successes.

A couple of those campaigns saw the Socceroos fall agonisingly short because of an unexpected result. Under this format, unexpected results may throw Australia into World Cup wilderness more than two years before a ball is kicked in Russia.

Paul Marcuccitti’s soccer column is published in InDaily on Mondays. He is a co-presenter of 5RTI’s Soccer on 531 program which can be heard from 11am on Saturdays.