Marumo Gallants interim coach Raymond Mdaka was full of praise after his side came from two goals down to win 3-2 against Saint Eloi Lupopo to win Group A ahead of USM Alger.
USMA trounced Cape Town City, who were dropping down from the CAF Champions League after being knocked out by Petro de Luanda.
But Gallants managed to pip them as group winners by one point, after securing four wins from their six games played, including a 2-0 triumph over the Algerian giants.
They only lost two games, both played out in North Africa, one of which was the controversial fixture against Al Akdhar, where two of their members of staff are still held in the hotel due to unpaid bills.
“This is one thing we wanted, we wanted to finish top, as much as we knew it wouldn’t be easy, but congratulations to the boys, congratulations to the team, I think we did a very good job, we’ll see what comes next,” Mdaka said in the post-match press conference.
“We know the character of the boys, and we wanted to give a number of our players a chance, most of them were not playing regularly, but we knew the character they have, so it wasn’t a big challenge – they might have taken it easy at first, but we were able to make it up and came back and did very well in the second half.”
Amid all the chaos, they still managed to secure the result needed where they can be drawn against US Monastir, Rivers United, or Pyramids in the last eight.
“It wasn’t easy this group, and we expect that in the quarter-finals too, people might think it was easy, but it’s not, we’ll take each game as it comes, whoever will be playing us, we’ll take it as it comes,” Mdaka added.
“You won’t say a lot because you don’t know much about those teams, even if we did, the most important thing is how you approach it when it comes.”
The Confederation Cup draw will take place on Wednesday at the CAF Headquarters in Cairo.
