Thunder booms in big win

By Stuart Teather
JOSEPH Di Iorio scored a hat-trick as Dandenong Thunder crushed Victorian Premier League cellar dweller Preston 4-0 at George Andrews Reserve on Saturday.
It was a David versus Goliath clash with top side Dandenong the hot favourite against the winless Preston and the game followed the script to perfection.
Dandenong mixed up its formation, breaking away from the lone striker approach that has worked wonders so far, running instead with two danger men up forward.
Di Iorio had just his second start for the year, taking the second spot up forward and he repaid his coach’s faith in spades.
Coach Stuart Munro said Di Iorio could have scored even more.
“That’s Joey’s strengths, he can get the ball and run at people and score goals,” he said. “He scored three, probably could’ve scored another two or three.”
On the different formation, Munro said he wanted to have his side attacking from the opening minute.
“Generally speaking we’ve been playing with the one striker and one in behind, but we thought we’d go with two against Preston. We wanted to have a go straight away, we felt we could have a go and put them under pressure.”
Munro hinted that the two-man attack could feature again in future games. “We can maybe be a little more adventurous in some of the games going forward,” he said.
“We’ll change it depending on our position in the game, it might be that we’ll go back to one in behind for this week. It was just an issue of what we had to do to consolidate in the league to get started with.
“We had a new group of players and we didn’t know how good they could be, so obviously we had to play a bit more conservatively.”
This week Dandenong heads out to Sunshine North to take on the Melbourne Knights in another game the Thunder will be expected to win. Melbourne, last year’s runner-up, is coming off a 1-1 draw with lowly Whittlesea and is in 10th position with three wins so far.