Fulham versus Wolverhampton Wanderers falls on the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces.
As a Shakhtar Donetsk player, Manor Solomon was living in Ukraine at the time, and he can still vividly recall that infamous moment.
“It was a terrible day,” he told the official matchday programme. “I woke up in the middle of the night when I heard explosions, so I turned on the TV and I opened my phone and I saw that some other players were texting asking what’s going on.
“Then on the Israeli news and the Ukrainian news they said something started in Kyiv and there were some explosions.
“Nobody knew what was going on exactly, but we understood that something bad was happening. I got a driver to take me to the border. I took all the luggage that I could.
“It was a terrible day, really. It took us maybe 18 hours to get to the border. And if it wasn’t a fast driver and if he didn’t take the back roads, it would have taken maybe two or three days, because everybody was going to the same place.
“And, also, at the border it was a big nightmare, seeing all the children, with their mothers suffering, not knowing what was going to happen to them.
“I passed the border, I had a family to come back to, I had a country to come back to, I had a home in Israel, but they didn’t know what was going to happen to them, so it was a really horrible day.”
Solomon still has friends living in Ukraine, and is desperate for the day when their lives – and those of the entire nation – can return to normal.
“It’s still bad,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on there in some parts. I know that my friends there are now more in the west, and there it’s more easy.
“But I know that in Kyiv it’s not normal. Sometimes there are alarms and I think they cannot leave their homes after 11pm, so it’s not a normal life and I just hope it will be finished as soon as possible, because it’s terrible.”
The full interview with Manor can be read in the Wolves matchday programme.
