Vafaei beat Barry Hawkins in the first round at the Crucible last year before losing 13-10 to Mark Williams.<\/p>\n
An injury wrecked the start of this season but an intensive physio programme got him back playing, although he then had a poor run of results following his return.<\/p>\n
“With my injury, I took two or three months [out] and after that I lost my form,” he added. “It was a shoulder problem, it was hurting my fingers and all the nerves on my left side.<\/p>\n
“It was tough to get back my form and to find something and the struggles started from there.<\/p>\n
“I’m under lots of pressure. I’m not having a good season. A lot of people have been like ‘where is he? what’s he doing?’. They’re thinking I’ve stopped playing snooker.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had a tough year mentally, personally, and everything.”<\/p>\n
But there has been some encouragement on the table as before his success at qualifying, he beat Williams and Zhang Anda to reach the quarter-finals of last month’s World Open where he was beaten by Trump.<\/p>\n
However, he said news from back home meant he was often not focused on snooker.<\/p>\n
“You get a bad text in the day and you can’t focus on your job. How can I focus?” said Vafaei.<\/p>\n
“No-one knows how tough it is but hopefully it will be over soon, then the safety comes back to my country.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vafaei beat Barry Hawkins in the first round at the Crucible last year before losing 13-10 to Mark…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-411418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}