A crossbar and a couple freak injuries made the difference.

Last night, the Penn State men's soccer team (3-6-1, 2-0 Big Ten) gave up a halftime lead to relentless pressure from a fast and potent, No. 9 ranked West Virginia squad and fell, 2-1.

The loss leaves the Nittany Lions winless against ranked opponents.

Marlon LeBlanc, now West Virginia's head coach after five years as an assistant at Penn State, saw his former team struggle to put any sort of offense together in the second half and lose its key performers to injury.

David Gray left early in the second half after heading a ball awkwardly, pinching a nerve in his neck.

The scariest injury of the night came a few minutes into the second half. Andrew Parr took a hard ball to the face from a few yards away and fell to the ground, knocked out cold.

The Mountaineers scored quickly after the tumultuous wave of injuries, as they served two balls into crowds in front of the net for their two goals on the night.

"You can't give up goals like that," head coach Barry Gorman said. "It doesn't matter whether it's junior high or pros, you just don't give up goals like that.

"That's a matter of toughness, you expect the other team to serve the ball well so you've just got to deal with them"

The defense acknowledged that the Lions' legs stopped churning, particularly as injuries decimated the lineup.

"After the first goal, they got some good momentum and we couldn't stop it or anything," defender Markku Viitanen said.

"We knew that they were gonna run all day long and in the second half we just, I don't know, hit the wall or something. We just couldn't respond to their movement."

For the entire second half, the Lions struggled to get the ball to the forwards, turning it over again and again in the midfield.

"I think offensively we didn't do anything we wanted to do," forward Simon Omekanda said. "We were looking to play in space and nothing worked in the second half."

Omekanda, who put four shots on goal, saw one ricochet off the crossbar and the other three stopped by the West Virginia goalkeeper, grew frustrated by both missed opportunities and by constantly being called offside by the referees.

"It was a combination of me going early and them not playing it early enough," Omekanda said. "I was trying to get in behind [the defense]. I got a couple, but we just didn't catch a break."

The Lions' lone goal came in the 40th minute, when Viitanen rifled a ball into the corner of the net from about twenty yards out.

"We played a nice combination," he said. "I got a great ball and just pulled it down and hit a good shot."

Gorman was visibly disappointed after the game.

"We had chances where we could've won it," he said. "We could've put it away. If Simon's one that hits the bar goes in, it's a different ball game.

"We've got enough injuries to fill an emergency room. It just seems to get worse. You have to live with it and just keep playing."