Marquette Men’s Soccer Hits A 2016 Low In Loss To Seton Hall

Thursday, November 4, 2016: Seton Hall men’s soccer defeated St. John’s, 1-0, in their regular season finale.

Saturday, October 10, 2015: Marquette defeated Seton Hall, 1-0, extending their unbeaten streak against the Pirates to eight matches. It was the only Big East win of the season for Marquette, and it was Seton Hall’s third loss of the conference season. The Pirates would go on to lose all nine of their league matches.

Saturday, October 1, 2016: Marquette loses, 2-0, to Seton Hall.

That. Sucks.

It snapped the eight match unbeaten streak for Marquette against Seton Hall. It snapped Seton Hall’s 11 match losing streak in Big East action. It snapped Seton Hall’s active four match losing streak. Seton Hall’s first goal of the match in the sixth minute snapped their streak of over 260 minutes without a goal. By scoring two goals against Marquette, Seton Hall scored the equivalent of 20% of the goals they had scored in the previous nine matches this season combined.

Look. Coming into this season, given that Marquette was returning absolutely no goal scoring from the 2015 roster and given that MU has 13 newcomers on the roster, there wasn’t a lot of reason for optimism. There were serious reasons to think that the 2016 campaign was going to be a dumpster fire, but the hope would be that a phoenix would rise from the ashes of that fire.

Then Marquette scored four goals in three straight matches. Sure, there are reasons to ask about the quality of UIC, Northern Illinois, and Northwestern this season, especially with their combined records of 7-17-4. But you don’t score four goals on accident, and you definitely don’t do it in three straight matches on accident, and you definitely don’t score two goals while down a man against Northwestern on accident.

There were reasons to think that this season would be reasonably successful when we headed to Big East play with Marquette holding a record of 3-1-2. Now they’re 3-3-3 overall and 0-2-1 including a draw with the only team they drew with last season and a loss to the only team they beat last season. This is really bad.

I don’t know which is worse: losing to Seton Hall for the first time since 2007, losing while allowing two goals to Seton Hall, who had scored more than one goal just twice this season, or getting shutout by Seton Hall, who was allowing 1.9 goals per game. It’s all a mess, and Marquette has some much tougher games in front of them than Seton Hall.

Up Next: As a part of Homecoming Week at Marquette, the Golden Eagles will host Wisconsin on Wednesday evening in their final non-conference match of the season. The Badgers (5-2-1) are on a two match winning streak after defeating Rutgers 1-0 on Saturday.