By Justin Schwarze
Dandenong City has had a fortnight to forget after falling to the NPL’s top two teams 0-3 across the last two rounds of the campaign.
City were outclassed in their visit to Oakleigh on Friday night, seeing Dandenong plummet to 10th in the table.
The visitors shot themselves in the foot early after a horrid back pass across goals was pounced on by Joseph Knowles, who took one touch before launching a thunderbolt from outside the box past Pierce Clark and into the back of the net.
The goal came less than five minutes into the match, making the challenge of beating the NPL’s second placed team even more difficult.
Things went from bad to worse for City when the defence was unable to clear the ball out of a dangerous area, leading to four consecutive Cannons corners.
On the fourth, Jacob Tratt was left completely unmarked, so he used the space to calmly header the ball in.
After just a tick over 13 minutes, Dandenong found itself staring down the barrel of a 0-2 deficit that looked to get uglier.
When the whistle was blown for halftime, City managed to not concede another goal but were being absolutely dominated around the ground.
The visitors had just one inaccurate shot for the entire half, while their opponents had nine total and three on target.
In the second half, Oakleigh dealt the final blow to Dandenong’s comeback hopes through a phenomenal goal.
Joe Guest floated a pass up and over the City defence, where it found Alex Salmon in stride.
Clark was caught completely out of position, and Salmon let the ball bounce once before chipping the keeper to give the hosts the 0-3 margin.
The Cannons rode the momentum to get the job done in front of the home crowd, having 16 shots for the game compared to Dandenong’s three.
City didn’t manage a single shot on target for the match, showing an area for improvement on a day where there wasn’t any source of consistent attack.
After a week off, Dandenong will look to regroup and gain back some confidence when it hosts bottom placed Port Melbourne Sharks in round 11.
