Zesco United suffered their third consecutive defeat in the 2025/26 CAF Confederation Cup after losing 1-0 to South Africa’s Kaizer Chiefs on Sunday.
Chiefs opened the scoring within the first minute through Pule Mmodi, who tapped home from close range after pouncing on a rebound header from a corner kick that was not well cleared by the Zambian side.
Reacting after the match, Khalil Youssef said: “I think we expected that, it will be a tough game. To be honest, it wasn’t a great game to watch, but it was a physical game for us. The target, it was three points. We didn’t come to play great football to enjoy, We come 3 points. I think we deserve to win this game also, we deserve these three points.”
Zesco opened their Confederation Cup group-stage campaign with a 1-0 defeat away to Zamalek before losing 3-2 at home against Al-Masry.
The team’s head coach, Mathews Ndlovu, said the early goal in the match against Chiefs unsettled his side.
“We would say we are had a tough challenge, especially as early as the one minute, 49 seconds where we conceded, I think our concentration at the back wasn’t so good. We gave them the momentum to dictate the pace, especially having given them the chance to score as early as one minute, 49 seconds,” he said. “And it gave us a bit of some pressure on how we should do it now, control the game, and hence a lot of mistakes and some coordination in the midfield were a bit of some lapses, which we were always commanding throughout the game and we gave them a lot of respect again in the midfield where they could take the pace at a given time.”
Despite sitting rock bottom of the group, Ndlovu urged his team to keep fighting in their remaining three matches.
“I think so far we have played three games and we haven’t won any game. We are remaining with, again, three games, which gives us a big challenge because especially if we’re not picking up points, then we have a big challenge all the same,” Ndlovu admitted.
“We need to fight to the end because it’s football. We’ll see now how we plan over the remaining three games. We shouldn’t give up. We still have a chance to see how we go because it is good for us, the exposure, and again, our way of overcoming the challenges we have faced in the past three games.”
Zesco United will face Kaizer Chiefs in the return leg next Sunday in Durban, South Africa.
