[1] The team captain Wadud Khalil who had represented his country at the 1948 Olympic Games in London was expelled from the army for his political affiliations and left for Austria in 1953 where he played for two clubs in the lower divisions in the city of Vienna with one of the reserve teams at Austria Wien and Austrian police club Polizei SV.
[1] The goalkeeper Adil Kamil got into a row with a colleague and decided it was best to hang up his gloves and try out boxing, becoming a national champion in the sport.
Another player Ghazi Abdullah went on to become one of Iraq’s top cartoonists and even worked with Uday Saddam Hussein’s sports magazine Al-Rasheed in the eighties.
[3] Only one of the 16 players from the squad which travelled to Turkey would remain in the side for Iraq’s next international fixture that was played six years later.
The sole survivor was Jamil Abbas who captained Iraq in their first full international against Morocco at the 1957 Pan Arab Games in Beirut and became one of the Iraqi national team’s longest serving players with a statue built in his honour after his retirement at the old Kashafa Stadium in Baghdad, where it stands today.