Gjivai Zekiel receives great support from Dávid Hancko. The 19-year-old talent suffered a serious knee injury at the end of January and has been working on his rehabilitation ever since. “You could see that he was really upset,” Hancko says in the ESPN documentary ‘Dávid Hancko: Think first, act second’.
“He joined the first team and was just starting to find his feet. Then you suddenly get an injury like that.” The 26-year-old left central defender shared his own background with Zekiel, in which he had to deal with major injuries. “I told him that at his age I had two broken legs. And look where I am now. No one worries about that anymore and I can play every three days.”
Fate seemed to strike Hancko at the age of 19. During the period that he trained with MŠK Žilina’s first team, he suffered two major injuries. The Slovak first suffered from a stress fracture in his foot at the time. He had to have surgery, but that didn’t happen, causing the bone to grow together incorrectly. Afterwards he still had to go under the knife, during which his bones were broken. Everything was secured again with a screw. After a year of injuries, Hancko returned. He started training and playing again, but within six months he developed the same condition again. This time on the other foot. “I said to my father: ‘I don’t know if anyone wants a player with two metal plates and two broken legs’. How am I ever going to make it? I thought clubs might reject me because of the plates and broken legs,” Hancko looks back on the difficult period.
The defender turned out to be mentally very strong. He fought his way back to Žilina and via Fiorentina and Sparta Prague he ended up at Feyenoord in 2022. With the Rotterdam club he became national champion and recently won the KNVB Cup. In the rumor circuit, the Slovakian is now regularly linked internationally to major European clubs.
