The No. 3 Georgetown men’s soccer team suffered its first road loss of the season Saturday, falling 1-0 to the lowly Seton Hall Pirates. The Pirates entered the game the game with a 3-6-3 overall record and a 0-3-1 mark in the Big East, but managed to pull off the upset over the Hoyas (7-3-4, 2-2-1 Big East).

“It is a game where I thought we did enough on the road to get it done and it just did not fall for us,” Head Coach Brian Wiese said. “If you play that game 100 times, you probably win 90 of them.”

Georgetown controlled the game for much of the first half and saw the vast majority of the offensive opportunities. The Hoyas had eight shots and three shots on goal, compared to just two shots and one on goal for the opposition. Freshman midfielders Christopher Lema and Arun Basuljevic had two of the best chances of the half, forcing saves by Seton Hall sophomore goalkeeper Julian Spindler in the third and 13th minutes. The team also had three corner kicks but was unable to convert any of them. Those missed opportunities would prove to be costly later in the game.

“The game was really lost, in a funny way, in the first 20 minutes when we did not take those early chances that were really good ones,” Wiese said. “Their goalie made a couple good saves, but it was more us missing than the goalkeeper making the saves.

The Hoyas’ chances only increased in the second half. The final 45 minutes of the game included 12 Georgetown shots, forcing Spindler to make five saves. Sophomore midfielder John Azzinari nearly put the Hoyas on top in the 54th minute, but Spindler again was there to stop the header and preserve the tie. Similar to the 2-0 win at DePaul (4-7-3, 1-3-1 Big East) on Saturday, Oct. 11, Georgetown was forced to try to find a way through a defense that was sitting in behind the ball and trying to absorb pressure.

“Seton Hall dropped more guys deeper and deeper, and it became a game again of how do we break down a really compressed team. They were just trying to counter out of it and find the opportunity to catch us on the break,” Wiese said.

Seton Hall’s offense also began to pick up in the second half, with six shots and three on goal. The Pirates then made the most of a counterattack and a defensive breakdown by Georgetown to score the only goal of the match. Sophomore midfielder Shawn Morrison took the ball to the end line and then crossed the ball back diagonally across the 18-yard box toward the far corner. The pass made it through both the offense and defense untouched before it finally found wide-open senior midfielder Andrew LoManto, who had run unmarked from deep in the midfield. LoManto shot low and to the right of senior goalkeeper and captain Tomas Gomez to give the Pirates the 1-0 lead.

The Pirates were called for 11 fouls over the course of the match, while the Hoyas were called for just one. The large difference was more a product of Georgetown’s style of play rather than an attempt by Seton Hall to play more physically.

“That indicator … is that we were not defending. It is hard to foul when you have the ball that much. We had the ball that much and were always the team being fouled. It is an indicator of the possession level of that game. We had the ball a lot,” Wiese said.

The loss is the second in a row for the Hoyas, their first losing streak of the season. The team will play No. 6 Creighton (11-1-2, 4-0-1 Big East) on Saturday. With four games left in the season, Georgetown will need to win out in order to compete for the regular-season Big East title.

“We have to be in a position where we are actually tied [at the top of the Big East standings] … and in order to do that, we are going to have to win the next four games,” Wiese said. “And that still does not guarantee anything.”