The first mascot in the history of Girona

GironaIf the new generations of Girona know perfectly well who the Mosca Sisa is, the official club mascot since 2020, and the slightly older waves knew Carmany, born from a drawing in the Tots som Girona campaign of 2011, you really have to be a lifelong fan to remember Geroni, who emerged in the late eighties and early nineties, with the team fighting to be promoted to the Second Division. Now it is fighting to return to the First Division and hosts Mallorca this Sunday at Montilivi (9 p.m., LaLiga TV Hypermotion). "It was me who got inside there and suffered the heat like a wretch," explains Martí Palahí (Girona, 1964), one of the founders of the Penya Gironina in 1982.

“In those days, it was different. We all knew each other. When we met at the pitch, we would point each other out. Look, today there’s what's-his-name or so-and-so. One day we were 300, the next 200. There were matches where we even counted ourselves,” confesses the now manager of the Can Gibert pitch bar. Palahí has spent many years behind a bar. He was in La Devesa, in Torres de Palau, in Sant Gregori, or in Banyoles, where he would plant white-and-red flags to the disbelief of the staff. “There was incredible hatred, but I couldn't help myself. Then I would take a photo and send it, so my friends could see it,” he says, between laughs. He also managed the bars at the Montilivi stadium, where he made the journey together from the Third Division to the first promotion to the First Division. “I missed the year of the promotion because I had a serious motorcycle accident and was admitted to the ICU for a month and a half. Do you remember the bottle that someone threw at the head of the linesman in the famous Girona-Lugo match? Well, it came from my bar. It was a mistake on my part, I wasn't allowed to serve them with caps and I did it,” he confesses.

Palahí started going to football matches accompanying his neighbor, and he liked it so much that he never left it. “I lived in Sant Daniel and I went there by bicycle. Then, with the group we hung out with at the pitch, we formed the Supporters' Club and I was the first member. There must have been about ten or twelve of us at the beginning. The headquarters was the Rhin Bar, the bus for away games left from there,” he specifies. Some of his adventure companions were his brother Josep, Lluís Bosch, or Albert Mateos, who years later would become a club director, head of the social area, and one of the promoters of the Genuine team. “We were the most radical in the group. We called Albert 'The Flagman' because he was always waving a very large flag. We had many clashes over football. More than two or three times I jumped onto the pitch to go after the referee, let the air out of his car tires, or went to wait for him on the highway,” he explains. But not everything was mischief: “I was a meat delivery man, and when the players locked themselves in because they weren't getting paid, I would approach the stadium and distribute it to them so they could eat. They would grill it.” Better let's talk about Geroni, or we'll get sidetracked.

“It occurred to Carles Teixidor, executive and president, that a keychain should be made, and the keychain turned out to be a dog, Geroni. Later, we thought that we should have a mascot identical to the keychain. And we started looking. We went around and around, but we couldn't find an identical costume anywhere,” describes Palahí, to whom some acquaintances provided the solution. “A group that frequented the Rhin Bar went on vacation to New York, they saw a lion costume and bought it. It was the closest thing to a dog we could have. The first mascot of Girona comes from the United States, yes,” he points out.

Since he was so bold, he put on the costume on his own initiative. “I would get dressed right at Montilivi. Right next to the offices, we had a storage room to leave the supporters' club's equipment, and I would change there. We moved around the stadium as if it were our own home. I would go onto the pitch, put on a bit of a show, and sit in the Preferential stand. We would invite kids from the youth academy and give them muffins, cokes, Fantas… That way they would come, and we would make more noise in the stands,” he explains. The costume “could not be torn or damaged, because we would have been left without one. When I finished, I would take it home and wash it. And for the next match, here we go again!” Palahí would last a couple of seasons playing Geroni.

Headlocks, disappearances and heads of garlic

“There weren’t many who knew it was me who was wearing the costume. One was Toni Soler, the former goalkeeper, who is a real joker. We often met in the grandstand. The day I lent Geroni to a friend, he ran into him downstairs, and he smacked him, thinking it was me. When he came up the stairs and saw me, he was stunned. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’, he asked me. ‘Watching the football, what else should I be doing?’, I replied. ‘And who is playing the lion?’, he insisted. ‘A colleague’, I admitted. ‘Well, I just gave him a slap thinking it was you’. We had a good laugh”, he says, bursting into laughter as if it were the first time he had heard the anecdote. Now, however, he turns serious: nobody knows where the lion is. “It kept passing from hand to hand, and we don’t know who has it. I am looking for it with Albert Martínez, the collector. We have spoken to people who supposedly should know, but there is no way”. From here, a plea for the reappearance of Geroni.

There is still room for another little story. “In the Girona-Salamanca play-off for promotion to the Second Division in 1992, I noticed that their goalkeeper had two heads of garlic inside the goal. I suppose it must have been a superstition. We were at 0-0 and when I realized it, I had an impulse: if that was what was preventing us from scoring, I had to take them away”. No sooner said than done. “During an attack by the Castilians, I jumped onto the field and swiped them. And I swear to you, I swear to you, in the next counterattack by Girona, we scored a goal. The heads of garlic became sacred. And they were huge… If I had thrown them at someone’s head, it would have hurt them”, he concludes.