Marquette Men’s Soccer Falls In Overtime To Seton Hall

On Saturday night, I was at UWM Panther Arena because my wife thinks sugar skulls are super neat and the Milwaukee Admirals were hosting the Chicago Wolves for Noche De Almirantes. It was great! The Ads had special sugar skull type sweaters, replacing their usual skull admiral logo. They scored less than two minutes into the game, and as it turns out, it was also Stuffed Animal Charity Drive Night, which meant that you could bring a stuffed animal to the game and then throw it on the ice when the Admirals scored their first goal. I had barely even sat down to watch when all of a sudden stuffed animals were going every which way onto the ice, including a three foot tall Homer Simpson doll. The Admirals scored three times in the first 13 minutes and then spent the rest of the game burying the Wolves. It was fun for the whole family.

I tell this story, because it means I did not go to Valley Fields for Senior Night for Marquette men’s soccer. It also means I was checking Twitter in between periods to see what was going on in the soccer, and as we exited the arena, it was clear that the match was going to overtime.

So, we drove over to Valley Fields. It’s a short drive, it’s not that far from a freeway entrance so it’s kind of on the way home anyway.

Rolled past the far west gate.......... and there was a 2 under Seton Hall on the Valley Fields scoreboard.

Seton Hall’s Carlton McKenzie scored his second strike of the night 122 seconds into extra time, giving the Pirates the 2-1 overtime victory against your Golden Eagles.

It’s a real shame, honestly, as Josh Coan had leveled the match on a feed from Luka Prpa in the 71st minute, and the Golden Eagles ended up with an advantage on shots in the match, 18-12. Alas, it was not meant to be for Marquette on what will be the final home match for the MU seniors.

With the loss, Marquette is now in a tie for seventh place in the Big East with Xavier at nine points. This is with one match left to be played, and only the top six teams in the Big East qualify for the conference tournament. There’s a roundabout way, in theory, I think, that Marquette could end up in a tie with currently in fourth place Creighton and make it into the conference tournament at 12 points, but the Jays hold the tiebreaker on MU and thus it means that the Golden Eagles can’t host a quarterfinal match.

Starting in seventh place for the final match day means that Marquette is going to need piles of help to get in this year. It was an advantage for MU heading into the Seton Hall match to be playing two teams behind them in the standings in the final two matches, but now, it’s not. Marquette can’t freeze a team in front of them in the standings if they beat DePaul this coming week, so they’ll need bad things to happen to some collection of Butler, Seton Hall, and Xavier to go with the theoretical win over the Blue Demons.

But that’s a story for later this week. Please enjoy these highlights, courtesy of the Big East Digital Network.