AUCKLAND – New Zealand U-17 football coach Steve Cain is refusing to let his side’s focus drift from the job in front of them when the Young All Whites begin the four-team OFC U-17 Championship against Vanuatu at North Harbour Stadium on Monday.

The Young All Whites were competitive throughout the recent Sanix Cup in Japan, losing only two games in normal time of six played, and finishing the tour with an impressive 4-3 win in a friendly against their hosts.

But despite that result, Liverpudlian Cain is adamant his side cannot yet afford to think about joining Japan on the list of qualified teams for the 2009 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Nigeria in September.

“We can’t look beyond these three qualifiers,” Cain said.

“We’ve said all along that the campaign was a two-phase operation. The first phase is to get through the qualifiers and that’s what we’ve been working towards for the past couple of months and that’s what the Japan tour was all about – getting the players to a level where we are physically, mentally, tactically and technically ready for these games.”

New Caledonia and Tahiti round out the tournament and with limited knowledge of any of their opponents, Cain said New Zealand would stick to the old adages of looking after their own game, and seeking to dictate play from the outset.

“We’ve got no idea of what we’ll come up against. We have a vague idea of what style they might play, but that can be a dangerous trap to fall into.

“You go into any tournament a bit blind so it’s a case of making sure that we’re not surprised by what we see on the pitch and have to waste valuable time trying to adjust.”

While British-based academy players Cameron Lindsay (Blackburn Rovers) and Andrew Milne (Glasgow Rangers) add vital experience along with Waitakere United first-teamer Zane Sole, Cain says throughout the squad there are players with the personality and physicality to compete.

“I do think we have a strong mentality because the training age of a lot of these players is older than 16 or 17 and they have been at the sharp end of the game in this country and overseas for longer than kids here have in the past.”

Meanwhile, 15-year-old Zach Margison has been added to the New Zealand squad as an eleventh-hour replacement for Nikolai Molijn who injured an ankle in a warm-up game last week.

Margison played for Auckland U-16 at the first day of the National Age-grade tournament in Napier on Wednesday before the young target man was plucked from that event on the advice of national scouts casting their eyes over New Zealand’s best young football talent.

New Zealand kick-off against Vanuatu at 3pm on Monday with New Caledonia meeting Tahiti in an earlier 12.30pm kick-off.

Story and photo courtesy of NZF Media