Men's Soccer Eyes Win in Final Non-Conference Contest

­After suffering its first loss in 10 games Saturday, the Harvard men’s soccer team (8-4-1, 2-1-1 Ivy) will look to bounce back in its return to non-conference action Tuesday night against the Stony Brook Seawolves (4-10-1, 2-3-0 America East). The Crimson has won its last five non-conference games by a combined 11-goal margin.

“Their record is not phenomenal at the moment but they are a very good playing team,” Harvard coach Pieter Lehrer said. “They play and get the ball moving, and it’ll be a good opportunity for us to work on all the stuff we need to do on attacking set pieces. It’s great to have this game.”

The Crimson had its nine-game unbeaten streak snapped by rival Princeton on Saturday night, falling behind by three goals before mounting a late comeback in the 3-2 loss. Two penalties in its defensive third doomed Harvard, as Princeton converted both a penalty kick and free kick into first-half goals. It was the first time all season that the Crimson allowed three goals.

Stony Brook is seemingly an ideal opponent to cure the team’s recent defensive ills. Before scoring three times in a Friday win against Albany, Stony Brook had scored just one goal in its four previous games. It was shut out five times in nine games during one mid-season stretch, and has scored three goals or more just three times all season.

After a game in which his team fell behind by three goals for the first time all season, Lehrer stood by his defense. The coach noted that the team’s mistakes against Princeton were atypical for a squad that posted three consecutive clean sheets earlier this month and said that the team is close to a turnaround.

“I think that we can get a couple things a little bit better on the energy part and on the defensive side of the game,” Lehrer said. “[However], the level of the group in practice in all these areas is exceptional. It’s not fully translating into the games but we are very close… We are not far off.”

The Seawolves last visited Cambridge in 2009 to face the best men’s soccer team in recent Harvard history. A 4-1 defeat of Stony Brook catapulted that year’s Crimson to a 14-4-1 record and the third round of the NCAA tournament, where it fell to Maryland, 2-0. The two squads drew, 1-1, four years ago in the only meeting since.

Even given its recent advantage over the Seawolves, Harvard is not taking Stony Brook lightly. Heading into a crucial Saturday matchup with Dartmouth, the current Ivy League leader, junior co-captain Kyle Henderson said that the team will not focus on either its last or its next Ivy League game—only its next opponent.

“We are not going to dwell on [Princeton] too much—we don’t get too excited about wins, we don’t get too down about losses,” Ashby said. “We take it one game at a time.”

On defense, the Crimson will have to contain Stony Brook midfielders Martin Giodano and Thibault Duval. Together, the pair have accounted for 40 percent of the team’s goals this year. Each has a shot on goal percentage more than 10 percent higher than the team average. Duval especially has made the most of his few chances, knocking in four goals on just nine attempts.

Overall, co-captain Kyle Henderson said that the team is eager to return to the field after a close lost that he argued “could have gone either way.” Henderson noted that the end of the team’s nine-game unbeaten streak, which spanned five weeks and assuaging any residual concerns from a 0-3 start, has had little effect on the team.

“A lot of people talk about the streak but being in it, I don’t really notice that you are doing something different necessarily,” Henderson said. “We have continuously been getting better … [The key] is continuing to fine tune things and prepare game by game to come out on top Tuesday and after that.”

--Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.