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Top Indian Professional eSports athlete and hardcore Chelsea fan Ankur Diwakar in conversation with Bollywood superstar Arjun Kapoor.
The latest installment of the Chelsea Celebrity Corner has a very special guest Ankur Diwakar. Ankur Diwakar has represented India in eSports at the Asian Games and is the South Asian Champion in PES 2018.
Diwakar was the champion of season 1 of MTV India Uncypher which was India's first televised multi-platform, multi-game, Esports tournament. Having chosen quite a special career-path and become an absolute winner at it, Ankur Diwakar opens up about how difficult it was to embark on the road hardly traveled by.
He talks about how he started off as a 'noob' playing against his neighborhood friends for Pokemon tazos and cards. He eventually graduated to college tournaments before going on to represent India at the Asian Games.
Diwakar reflects upon his experience at the Asian Games saying that he gets goosebumps from just talking about it. The 29-year-old says that he felt like a soldier wearing the Indian jersey at the Asian Games.
He had to win the Indian championship and then the South Asian championship just to qualify for the showdown at the Asian Games. Diwakar says that winning those two was more of a struggle for him than the actual event.
Ankur Diwakar's initiation into the world of gaming was through FIFA 02 and he reveals that he used to copy Chelsea's style of play, mainly Lampard's when he used to play the game.
Ankur Diwakar reveals Frank Lampard was his biggest role model and names his Ultimate Chelsea XI
Ankur Diwakar used to have friends who used to play both cricket and football but most of them were Manchester United or Arsenal fans. He kept himself neutral until he watched Jimmy Hasselbank score an absolute scorcher against Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League.
Ankur, whose favorite color is blue, did not need to think twice about which club to support from thereon. Interestingly, that's exactly how Arjun Kapoor also became a Chelsea fan. Talk about coincidences.
Frank Lampard is Ankur Diwakar's role model and among the current crop, his favorites are Mason Mount, Reece James, and Hakim Ziyech. Ankur Diwakar also picked his Ultimate Chelsea XI and it looks like this:
Petr Cech; Branislav Ivanovic, Marcel Desailly, John Terry, Ashley Cole, Claude Makelele, Frank Lampard, Michael Ballack, Gianfranco Zola, Eden Hazard and Didier Drogba.
