This Should Never Have Happened

Описание: The Indiana Twisters were 11-3 at home during the 1997 Continental Indoor Soccer League season and had won 10 of their last 11 games at Market Square Arena before facing the Houston Hotshots in the first round of the playoffs.

Twisters' management gave up home field advantage and hosted the first game of the best-of-two (yes, best-of-two) on Friday night, Oct. 3, 1997 rather than play the first game on the road in Houston and host a Sunday night game on the same day the Indianapolis Colts were at home against the New York Jets. (As it turned out, the Twisters drew the largest crowd of the first round on the Friday night.)

In front of a national television audience, the Twisters not only lost, 6-4, they lost defender Carlos Zavala to a knee injury because the artificial turf was laid directly over the ice surface put down for the start of hockey season and the strips of turf came undone and had to be held down (badly) with duct tape.

Then, in a reversal of form, the Twisters actually went to Houston for the second game and won. (They had never won in The Summit before.) That tied the series, forcing a 15-minute "mini-game" tiebreaker. The Hotshots won that, 4-1, and eventually went on to lose to Seattle in the last CISL finals ever played.

That weekend turned out to be the last one in Twister history, as the league folded right before Christmas. The owners of the Indiana Blast outdoor soccer team bought what remained of the Twisters' assets in an attempt to place the team into the National Professional Soccer League, but they were unsuccessful.