The 1953 Colombo Cup was the second edition of the

Colombo Cup The Colombo Cup was an annual football tournament first held in Colombo, Ceylon. It was also known as Asian Quadrangular Football Tournament. Established in 1952 by the Ceylon Football Association as a part of the Colombo Fair, teams from India, Pa ...

held in

Rangoon Yangon ( my, ရန်ကုန်; ; ), formerly spelled as Rangoon, is the capital of the Yangon Region and the largest city of Myanmar (also known as Burma). Yangon served as the capital of Myanmar until 2006, when the military government ...

Burma Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

. India won the cup for a second time by winning all thee matches. It was India's first outright win in an international football tournament played abroad. The team received the rolling Colombo Cup and a Special Burma Cup for permanent retention.

Overview

The India team arrived in

on 22 October 1953 and the Pakistan side, a week before. ''

The Indian Express ''The Indian Express'' is an English-language Indian daily newspaper founded in 1932. It is published in Mumbai by the Indian Express Group. In 1999, eight years after the group's founder Ramnath Goenka's death in 1991, the group was split betw ...

'' described the

Aung San Stadium The Bogyoke Aung San Stadium () is a multi-purpose stadium, located in downtown Yangon, Myanmar. It was built as an athletic ground in 1906, which was completed in 1909 and named as Burma Athletic Association Ground, where many sports were held ...

, where all matches were to be played, as having "concrete and semi permanent stands all around the ground" with a capacity of 30,000. The rules of the tournament had not made wearing boots mandatory. Four of India's players —

Sailen Manna Sailendra Nath Manna ( bn, শৈলেন মান্না; 1 September 1924 – 27 February 2012), known popularly as Sailen Manna, was an Indian football player who represented the India national team between 1948 and 1956. Predominantly p ...

, Ahmed Khan,

Pansanttom Venkatesh Pansanttom Venkatesh (1926 – 1 June 1977) was an Indian footballer. Venkatesh played for East Bengal and the India national football team during his professional career. Club career Venkatesh spent most of his club career in East Bengal, and ...

and M. Thangaraj (in the second half) — played bare-footed against Pakistan in the tournament's first game, on 23 October.

Overview

Squads

Points table

Matches

Reference