Fans Dig Club's Grave after Promotion Miss

Disgruntled fans of a Serbian regional league club have vented their frustration at Macva Sabac's repeated failure to gain promotion to the national second division by digging a grave on their pitch, a club official said Tuesday.

The two-meter long shallow grave was also adorned with a cross carrying a gruesome message which read: "Second division or this".

The gave had been dug on Macva's pitch in the western town of Sabac, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Belgrade, on Monday.

"We cannot believe that someone could have such an idea," Zvone Jovanovic, a Macva official told AFP.

Jovanovic said the police have opened an inquiry into the incident, although the people responsible remain unknown.

Despite the somewhat obvious nature of the message's origin, given the club have missed out on promotion six years in a row, Jovanovic said he was "convinced that it was not done by our fans."

"For years we were getting really close to be promoted into the second division and we failed to reach that goal by only a few points," he lamented.

The incident didn't seem to have any effect on the club's players, though, who only a few hours after the macabre discovery won a league match that moved them up to second in the table.

Although once an elite level team during the times of the former Yugoslavia, Macva Sabac, founded in 1919, have dropped down into the regional levels.