Snooker star Hossein Vafaei has been told to avoid returning to the Crucible in the future after he criticized the arena following his first-round defeat at the World Snooker Championship.
Vafaei, known as the “Prince of Persia,” was dispatched 10-5 by 2019 champion Judd Trump on Sunday and later lashed out at the venue.
“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,” Vafaei said.
“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 did not sit well with some of his fellow professionals, 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 said in a press conference after his first-round victory.
“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.”
Murphy added that Vafaei may not be as emotionally connected to the tournament as UK players because he did not grow up in the country and may not have the same childhood memories associated with the Crucible.
“Maybe he didn’t come here as a nine-year-old child as I did and remember running up that road after Steve Davis for his autograph. Maybe he doesn’t have those memories to draw on, but this is holy ground for snooker players and Hossein should remember that,” Murphy said.
“He said he doesn’t want to come back. Don’t come back. He doesn’t have to, he’s not forced to come here. Don’t come.”
