Gary Wilson has hit out at "naive" pundits over their response to his disappointing early exit at the World Snooker Championship. In an emotional post-match interview, he revealed that his physical and mental struggle with the yips is continuing to worsen as he crashed out in the last 32 following a 10-5 defeat to Judd Trump on Tuesday.

The 40-year-old squandered a 4-1 lead and after the loss dismissed a claim from TNT Sports' reporter Rachel Casey that he was "flying out of his boots early in the match." Wilson replied: "Absolutely not. I'm just masking problems all the time. I wasn't flying out of my boots at all. I am and I have been since I was 13, a better player than this, and it's just constantly the same sort of story."

"I'm just masking problems out there constantly, yipping at everything. The balls are going in the hole, but I'll be nowhere positionally, because I've absolutely butchered every shot. People in the snooker world, especially players and commentators, who really should know the game and should know how it feels, are being really naive.

"They're being really naive in the sense that they say silly things like 'composure' and 'shot selection', and don't realise - as much as I keep saying it - the problems that I'm going through. It's just frustrating, just constantly frustrating. As I say, I've always been a better player than what I've shown a lot of the time in the latter part of my career so far.

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"I thought a number of years ago in the semis [of the 2019 World Championship] that I was struggling with certain shots. My god, I'm struggling 10 times more than that now. I'd take that now. I had composure then, I had bottle. Ask Stephen Hendry, ask Ding Junhui, ask Stuart Bingham, ask a number of other players I could name that have had problems like this.

"They should know it's not down to composure or shot selection. If I'm coming out, and I look like I'm losing my head, I'm not losing my head. I've got a good head, if I feel like I'm cueing the ball half-decent. I'm just lost. I can come out and play a few frames where the balls go in the hole, and if they go in, everyone goes, 'oh look, he's playing great'.

"And I'm going, 'I feel absolutely horrific'. It's not [about] speaking to somebody. It's somebody getting this arm to physically do what it needs to do. It's just not happening. It's not a sort of mental state. The mental state comes from stuff not going well.

"The other form of the yips is where you can't even push the cue through. I've got the other one where I'm pushing it through dead quick, just to get the shot over with, just rushing it and uncontrollably. So it starts obviously mental, turns physical, and then it gets to a point where it's so hard to go back from that it gets habitual."