Chipolopolo 1 - Togo 0

At 4:00am on Wednesday morning, my two Dutch housemates and I woke up in pitch darkness and made our way to the inter-city bus station in town. By 6:30am, we found a bus going to Copperbelt Province, where Zambia would be playing Togo in a World Cup qualifier later that afternoon. Around 1:00pm, after a long and bumpy ride, we arrived in Chingola, and linked up with a group of die-hard Lusaka-based fans (like ourselves) to find tickets and complete the last leg of our journey.

Fifteen minutes before the 2:00pm kickoff, the three of us, along with four others I had invited, marched into the Chililabombwe stadium sporting Zambian colours of green, red and yellow. We encountered roaring cheers, partly because of general excitement about the game, and partly, I think, because of the novelty of seeing seven confused looking 'muzungus' (white people) wading through a sea of football-loving Zambians. I managed a few snapshots on our way around the stands.

Zambia's Chipolopolo (Copper Bullets) scored the first and only goal. The celebration was raucous. If not for this fence and an abundance of police officers, the pitch would surely have been swarmed with fans. The match turned out to be dominated by the Chipolopolo, whose only fault was a complete lack of finishing touch. The score could easily have been 5-0. Mind you, Togo's Arsenal-based superstar, Emmanuel Adebayor, refused to fly to Zambia reportedly because of rumours that his plane would crash; Togo's coach quit over internal disputes one week prior; and the Chipolopolo dedicated the match to Zambia's late president, making the stakes of winning quite high indeed.

After halftime, we switched ends to continue to watch Zambia's offense from up close. In this picture, you see the overcrowded bleachers, the blooming jacaranda trees surrounding the stadium, and a Zambia corner kick in action (Zambia in white).

If only North American sports fans were this creative.

Zambia's love of football is surpassed only by its devotion to Christianity – why not to combine the two?

After the game, us seven muzungus and our fellow Zambian fans caught a minibus and then a bus back to Lusaka, completing a marathon 22-hour day. The bus, which left around 8:00pm that night, was a quarter full of singing and drinking football fans. Until around midnight, the driver blasted song after song about the Zambian football team – apparently, there is an entire industry of pop music devoted to the Chipolopolo. After resigning to the fact that sleep was simply not an option, I came to really enjoy the celebration. Driving across the Zambian countryside, bopping in my seat to nationalistic football songs, I felt a part of something special.

Since the tragic 1993 plane crash that killed almost the entire Zambian football team, the state of the country's football hasn't been the same. But the love of the game is there. I think it's only a matter of time before Chipolopolo re-enters the vocabulary of football fans the world over.