Snooker ace to the rescue of refugee
SCOTS snooker star Anthony McGill rescued a Ukrainian refugee from the war-torn country.
The former World Championship semi-finalist sponsored Tanya Volovelska to flee heavily bombed Kharkiv.
Snooker fan Volovelska drove the length of Ukraine with her elderly parents to escape bomb attacks in the city. She travelled via Germany and is now staying with McGill in Glasgow until the war in her homeland is over.
McGill, who got her tickets to watch him play at the Crucible this week, said: “It’s somebody I know, a snooker fan.
“Obviously the thing in Ukraine is a nightmare and it’s terrible. These people who are leaving Ukraine have nowhere to go.
“She’s from Kharkiv, on the eastern side of Ukraine, which is getting bombed to you know what by Russia.
“I just said to her if she needed somewhere to stay and she took me up on it.
“I live alone and I’ve got a spare bedroom and a lot of time I’m out either practising or away at competitions so my house is empty a lot of the time anyway.
“It’s good to help people if you can. Not everybody can help.
“I’m really lucky I have the facilities to host someone and help out a little bit.
“It’s like that story where there’s little starfish that have washed up on a beach and a man walking along the beach is throwing the starfish back into the water one by one.
“Somebody else says, ‘You can’t make a difference, there’s millions of starfish’. He threw another one back in and said, ‘I made a difference to that one’. So, you just do your bit.
“I’d like to think if there was a war in Glasgow, or the UK, and Glasgow was getting bombed and I needed somewhere to go that someone would help.”
McGill signed up for the Government scheme Homes for Ukraine but found the process painstakingly slow.
He added: “The Government are really holding it up. It’s a joke.
“It took Tanya like a month to get everything sorted.
“I think the British people are very helpful but the people at the top don’t seem to really care, to be honest.”