COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Nikola Kavazovic sat alone in the hot and sticky interior of Sugathadasa Stadium this week, waiting for someone to talk to.

A rare interview with a local reporter had been arranged with Kavazovic, the 39-year-old Serbian coach of Sri Lanka’s national soccer team, but the interviewer had not arrived. Soccer attracts a fraction of the interest of cricket here, so any opportunity to drum up interest is worth pursuing. As Kavazovic stewed in the stadium lobby, his team stood on the field in the unforgiving midafternoon sunshine, waiting for its training session to begin.

“I was prepared that we would not have any support,” he said. “Unfortunately, I was right.”

Sri Lanka was about to take the first steps on the long road to the 2018 World Cup in Russia. As one of the 12 lowest-ranked teams in Asia, it had been drawn into one of the first games of the 2018 qualification cycle, which began Thursday — 242 days after Germany lifted the 2014 trophy in Brazil.

Sri Lanka, an island nation of about 20 million people southeast of India, was the second-highest-ranked of the 12 teams, and it was scheduled to play Bhutan, a long-isolated constitutional monarchy in the Himalayas that was ranked 209th — dead last — by FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. While it was proving difficult to drum up local interest in the game, the match offered a rare chance for both squads.