The head coach of "Minaya" Volodymyr Sharan spoke about the difficult circumstances in which his team's recent match with Metalist 1925 Kharkiv (1:0) took place in Uzhgorod in the 8th round of the Ukrainian Championship.
“The features of this match happened for the first time in the lives of the players and our team as a whole. For three and a half hours, all its participants had to sit in a bomb shelter. It was safe, but cold. The delegate of the match said that everyone should be in cover, and we were forced to wait there for the air raid to end.
Considering the situation, we thought about how we would go home after the match. After all, our train to Uzhgorod departed from Kyiv at 20:05, and if the game was delayed, then they might not be on time. And we already have a match against Shakhtar on Saturday (this fight was later rescheduled - ed.), so we planned to be in Transcarpathia on Thursday morning.
Sitting in the bomb shelter, we didn’t think much about the game — I wanted it to start as soon as possible and our team could go home on time. The last week and a half in Kyiv was dangerous, as we could see on the eve of the match. Arriving in the capital on Tuesday, they heard three serious explosions. When we drove by the station, we saw their consequences. This was very hard to watch.
A little more than a week before, "Minaj" held a duel with "Kryvbas" in Kyiv, and the next day, on October 10, terrible things happened in the capital. People told us what happened that day. Our football players knew about it, but it is one thing to hear stories, and quite another to see it with your own eyes. In particular, this applies to a residential building destroyed by the enemy in the city center. It's hard, very hard to see.
Fortunately, there were no more air raid alerts, and we spent the night normally before the match with Metalist 1925. But on Wednesday, the alarms again set in, because of which they spent so much time in the shelter. The delegate of the match said that if we have a desire not to hold this fight, we have the right to refuse. But our thoughts were only about how to get home.
We decided that we would not go from Kovalivka to Kyiv, but would head to another station on the way from the capital. There were two options - Berdichev or Fastov. It’s good that we have good friends, thanks to whom Ukrzaliznytsia was given permission for the Uzhgorod train to make an unscheduled stop in Fastiv. There our team got into it. Otherwise, it would take two hours to go to Berdichev - that is where this train stopped after Kyiv. And then the next stop was only in Lviv," Sharan quotes "UA-Football".