“Free Dominik!” social networks roared in that winter of 2021.
And Dominik Greif (26), installed in a hotel in Palma de Mallorca, surrendered weapons.
Mallorca loved him and their coach, Luis García, loved him, but Slovan Bratislava asked for a lot, they asked for a lot.
“Free Dominik,” Greif published on Twitter, on his bored afternoons at the hotel, when he saw himself waiting for Godot.
And the hashtag would end up going viral: “Free Dominik!”, the tweeters supported.
They supported him by dozens.
Tolo Jaume, editor of the newspaper Última Hora, remembers that afternoon waiting at the hotel doors, long guards the transfer markets give us. The Mallorca directors and the representatives of Greif, the Slovakian goalkeeper, came and went.
And after a handful of hours, they all appeared and said:
–There is no white smoke.
Greif regresaba and Bratislava.
–Months later, Mallorca returned to the fray –says Tolo Jaume–. Finally he agreed to pay a lot for it (estimated to be around 2.5 million euros). And in the summer of 2021, Dominik Greif settled in Palma de Mallorca.
That was not a piece of cake.
Suddenly, Greif suffered a mysterious back injury. He found himself lying on the bed, unable to train, even unable to move.
A year like this.
–They never told us what it was about. Maybe it was a hernia, we have never known exactly – says Tolo Jaume. The fact is that, after a year, the club was studying the possibility of discarding him.
In March 2022, Javier Aguirre ran into trouble. He had just become the coach of Mallorca (and still is), and upon landing in the Balearic capital, he said:
–When I arrived, Dominik was lying there. I didn’t know what to do with him, we were going to sell him, give him away, I don’t know… He did his part, he went to his country, he put himself in the hands of a doctor and they found the problem, but it took him six eight months of treatment and the truth is that in these two years he has suffered a lot.
Within a year, Greif was afloat.
It wasn’t for long.
By then, Predrag Rajkovic had seized ownership of the vermillion mark. Rajkovic worked.
So Greif was ostracized.
He would barely have opportunities to shine in 2023, and he has barely had any options this season, to the astonishment of analysts and observers of the club, who insist and cross each other:
–The good one is Greif!
While taking refuge in the company of Martin Valjent, the other Slovak from Mallorca (“they are intimate, they always move together,” says Tolo Jaume), Greif waited at his window.
It is a cliché, and also a reality: the Copa del Rey is the window for the substitute goalkeeper.
Greif knows this well.
He has occupied the Mallorca team in the five cup matches (six games), always unbeaten, he has only given up one goal in the second leg of the semi-finals against Real Sociedad and on Tuesday he became the star of the match, after stopping a penalty against Brais Méndez in the first half, and the decisive penalty against Mikel Oyarzabal, already in the round. And just yesterday, in the parking lot of the Son Moix stadium, the wife of the new hero took out a confetti cannon and come on, little papers flying, all multicolored, to greet her husband.
–And they left the man there –says Tolo Jaume–: for an hour signing autographs. Finally, so many years later, his time had come.
