Soccer But Make It Hockey: Huge Brawl Breaks Out At Indoor Soccer Game

I know not everyone can appreciate soccer. It's not for everyone and can be a bit of an acquired taste, like a complex, robust cabernet sauvignon with minimal scoring and extra flopping.

But I think more people would get into it if there was more action like what we saw following a Major Arena Soccer League match between the Milwaukee Wave and Tacoma Stars on Wednesday.

I wasn't familiar with the MASL, but I like it already for reasons we're about to get into.

The Wave and Stars had just wrapped up an overtime thriller with the Wave taking a 7-6 win.

That's the first thing I like about MASL. 13 goals in a match, and I looked at some other scores from around the 12-team league, and that's pretty standard fare.

Awesome.

Anyway, the two sides were taking sides when it started to get very heated in the middle of the pitch (which is soccer speak for "field") and eventually off of it and down the tunnel too.

Look, I'm not one to condone on-field violence… I'm just going to say I probably wouldn't have spent too much time writing about the MASL today.

My theory here is the smaller pitch was an issue, something I think regular soccer needs to fix. A smaller playing surface adds to the intensity and physicality. It's one of the reasons North American hockey is usually more physical than European hockey played on a bigger ice sheet.

Tensions flare in tight confines, and I think that's at least a factor to some degree in this indoor soccer brawl.

Of course, there were repercussions from this kind of nonsense. According to The New York Post, Tacoma’s Roman Torres, Luis Birrueta, and Stefan Mijatovic were all suspended, with Mijatovic getting the biggest penalty, a four-game sussy for "his in-game and post-game conduct, and for making unprofessional, offensive and abusive language/comments in-game and post-game."

Nasty stuff, but it might make folks tune into the next MASL match.