By the time the final whistle blew, the majority of the fans had already left. Soggy, ripped up roster sheets lay in their places as the players, drenched, limped off the field with dejected looks on their faces.

“We’ve been wonderful all year and tonight we weren’t,” Syracuse head coach Ian McIntyre said.

It wasn’t the game that people had come to see. Save for a few bright moments, Syracuse slugged out a sloppy game with Hartford. Passes rolled out of bounds, players ran into each other and quality offensive chances on either end were at a premium.

Both times midfielder Julian Buescher found a way to scrap for a goal to put the Orange on top, Hartford answered just minutes later. Syracuse didn’t look like a team that played even with No. 4 Clemson for 89 minutes and nine seconds on Saturday. Instead, No. 15 SU (9-4-2, 3-2-1 Atlantic Coast) struggled to a 2-2 tie against Hartford (4-5-5, 0-2-2 America East) at SU Soccer Stadium on Tuesday.

“I was expecting a reaction, but unfortunately it wasn’t the one I was hoping for,” McIntyre said. “… We were a little bit off color and we looked a little bit second best.”

Buescher’s first goal came 18 minutes in when midfielder Juuso Pasanen’s shot was blocked and bounced right to him. Buescher fired a ball from the left side of the box into the top right corner.

Three minutes later, though, defender Louis Cross and goalkeeper Hendrik Hilpert collided on a free kick, sending both players to the ground and leaving Hartford’s Andre Morrison with an uncontested goal along the back post.

The Hawks nearly took the lead when a pass from defender Miles Robinson back to Hilpert had to be kicked away as a Hartford forward reached the ball, sending it flying sideways.

“First half was one of the worst performances we’ve had all year,” midfielder Oyvind Alseth said. “Bad quality, bad intensity. We didn’t seem like a team that wanted to win the game.”

The Orange came out in the second half looking like a new team in both its play and uniforms.

SU ditched its orange jerseys and shorts for white jerseys with blue shorts to help the players and referees differentiate between the two teams better, Alseth said.

Before Hartford could even gain possession in SU’s half, the Orange took three shots and forced three corners. Buescher converted on a penalty kick after one of his shots was blocked in the box with a hand and it seemed like Syracuse could run away with the game.

Hartford couldn’t maintain a single offensive possession until 17 minutes into the half.

But then a cross from about 30 yards out found its way over Alseth’s head and to an unmarked Hartford defender Blake Jones in the back of the penalty area, who scored on the Hawks’ only shot of the half.

Seven minutes after it seemed like SU had turned the whole game around everything stopped: the momentum, the quality of chances and the intensity.

“We came out of the locker room fired up,” Alseth said. “Then got that second goal and kind of dropped a little bit after that and couldn’t get back up to the intensity level that we had.”

The final 26 minutes of regulation came and went without a goal as did 20 minutes of overtime. McIntyre’s voiced cracked and popped as he urged his players to press, but nothing made a difference.

Passes fluttered through the box and players ended their runs early. Buescher’s last shot to salvage the game was chipped just over the crossbar as players crashed to the ground in front of him.

“Maybe we should have believed more in it and pressed more,” Buescher said. “It looked like a couple guys didn’t really believe we could score a goal. And in the last quarter we weren’t really that tough or that strong.”

Published on October 20, 2015 at 11:23 pm

Contact Jon: jrmettus@syr.edu | @jmettus