Following the encounter, Vafaei hissed: “You want to go somewhere really nice as a player, as a media team. You walk around the Crucible and it smells really bad. As a player I’m honest, it’s just really bad. Everything’s so bad.
“You go to other venues in other countries and you see how nice they treat you. Everything is shiny. But here it’s completely different. If you ask me do I want to come back here again, I tell you ‘no way.’ The practice room, do you see anything special? I feel like I’m practising in a garage.”
Vafaei’s comments didn’t go down well with some of his fellow pros and on Monday he received a word of advice from 2005 world champion Shaun Murphy.
“Listen, this is a working theatre, it’s not a purpose-built snooker venue,” Murphy explained in a press conference after seeing off Lyu Haotian 10-5 in his first round match. “We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of snooker being here.
“If the World Snooker Tour turned up tomorrow to do a site visit, they probably wouldn’t come here because it’s not big enough. There’s nothing we can do about that. But this is holy ground and it’s almost sacrilege for a professional snooker player to be so openly critical about our home.
“Hossein should educate himself on how our tour works and the relationships with WST and our broadcast partners, our venues and how special these places are. Does he think he’s helping the sport grow by being so openly critical of one of our business partners? He hasn’t helped the sport at all and I was always taught by my mum, if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything.”
