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Turkish club Sivasspor remained loyal to its tradition of sheep killing ahead of a match with Serbia’s Rad Belgrade. Serbian captain Radomir Koković shared his impressions of the rite with the Serbian press. When the Serbs came to the stadium for training, Koković said, they saw two men pulling sheep and fetching long knives for the sheep killing rite.

Serbian papers said the football players intimidated by the scene came back to the cloakroom and refused to enter the stadium until the referee forced them to.

“The tribunes were fuming, and the football players applied the blood of the beheaded sheep to their bodies. The Turkish captain came up to greet me, and he had blood on his hands. The grass was also bloody. For them, this must be normal, but I did not expect to face something of the sort in the stadium. The impression of what we had seen did not fade away while we were playing with the Turkish team, so we lost the match 1-4. I will long remember what I saw in Turkey,” Radomir Koković said.