Nurunnabi Chowdhury (; 1934 – January 2003), better known as Nabi Chowdhury, was a former Bangladeshi football player and the first East Pakistani or Bengalis to captain the Pakistan national football team.
He earned recognition while playing for Dhaka Wanderers from 1954 to 1956, winning a hat-trick of First Division titles during his tenure there. In 1958, he represented Mohammedan SC in the IFA Shield in Calcutta, India. In the same year, he captained PWD Sports Club in the inaugural edition of the Aga Khan Gold Cup held in Dhaka.
In 1958, he left his duties at the Pakistan Air Force and, the following year, joined the East Pakistan Police, representing its football team until his retirement in 1968.
In the 1958 edition of the National Championship held in Multan, Nabi captained East Pakistan, as his team exited the tournament in the quarter-final, falling 1–3 to Punjab Reds, the junior string of the team they had faced in the previous year's final. On 16 October 1959, Nabi represented East Pakistan during an exhibition match in Gujranwala against the local Al Hilal Club, scoring the winner in a 2–1 victory from a direct corner after Shah Alam scored the first for East Pakistan.
Nabi remained part of the East Pakistan team during the 1959 National Championship held in Hyderabad, where his team again finished runners-up, losing to 0–1 to Baluchistan in the final held on 7 November 1959. Eventually, in the following edition held in Karachi, he was part of the East Pakistan team that won its maiden National Championship, defeating Karachi White 1–0 in the final held on 27 November 1960.
Following 1960, when the EP Sports Federation began sending divisional teams to the National Championship, Nabi started representing the Chittagong Division. In January 1961, he represented East Pakistan in two exhibition matches against the touring Burma national team in Dhaka and Chittagong.
He later participated in both the 1954 Asian Quadrangular Football Tournament and 1955 Asian Quadrangular Football Tournament, with the latter held on home soil, in Dacca, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). In 1956, he represented Pakistan during a series of friendlies against Singapore, China and Ceylon. Nabi captained Pakistan at the 1958 Tokyo Asian Games, the first Bengali to do so. The team, including six Bengali players, tied the first game 1–1 with South Vietnam and lost its final game 1–3 to the Republic of China. Prior to the tournament, he captained the team during exhibition matches against the likes of Malaya and Singapore.
East Pakistan White
East Pakistan
Pakistan
Individual
|
|