The Brisbane Strikers produced their best performance of the season and drummed out a warning to other clubs in the race for the top four with a ruthless 4-0 demolition of the Rochedale Rovers at Perry Park last night.

While the scoreline sounds convincing enough, the performance in achieving it was perhaps even more resounding because the Rovers were restricted to barely a sniff of goal while the Strikers could have had six or seven with a bit more luck.

Supporters who came out in good numbers to watch the game were entitled to expect an evenly matched encounter between two good teams who both believe in playing open, attacking football. Sure enough, they got the open, attacking spectacle but it was mostly from the home side. In fact, there was very little for the Rovers supporters to get excited about after the opening five minutes, in which the three-man Strikers backline of Stuart McLaren, Adam Webber and Daniel Leach were stretched once or twice by Rochedale's Alex Panic and Greg Thomas.

After the Rovers' opening salvo, the five-man Strikers midfield quickly got to grips with things, and with DamienWaugh, Nathan Carloss and Stewart Drinkeld winning most of the loose balls in the middle of the park and linking well with wide men Michael Butters and Eli Gilfedder, the Rovers defence found itself getting turned around quite regularly.

On one such occasion in the fifteenth minute of the game the Strikers earned a free kick about ten metres from the byline to the right of the Rovers' penalty area and when Waugh delivered an outswinging ball to the back post a nod-down by either Di Losa or Gilfedder found new signing Michael Giallourakis only metres out and stabbing out a foot. The ball looked certain to cross the line but was somehow scrambled away by a panicked Rovers defence.

With the Rovers unable to get any sort of sequence of possession going, the Strikers were looking unexpectedly comfortable as the half wore on. Another attack by the home side involving McLaren, Carloss, Di Losa, Giallourakis and Butters pulled the Rovers' defence from one side of the penalty area to the other and finished with another desperate goal-line scramble from which the Rovers again managed to somehow emerge unscathed.

Another raid down the right saw Drinkeld produce an incisive pass that put Gilfedder away down the left. Gilfedder beat a defender and produced a firm cut-back from the byline that beat Rochedale's goalkeeper, Mario Aparicio, for pace and squirted across the six-yard box to Di Losa. The big striker, however, could not keep his first-timed shot down and the chance went begging when he skied it over the bar.

But the pressure from the home side was mounting, and something simply had to give. The Strikers broke through when a ball was played towards Giallourakis in centre-field. Giallourakis' mobility had been troubling Tony Pearcey and Kieren Galloway, and the slightly-built striker had been making some intelligent runs away from goal to present himself as an option to his midfielders. This was exactly what Giallourakis was doing as the ball reached him in the twenty-sixth minute. With Di Losa making a run forward at the same time to Giallourakis' left, Giallourakis hooked the ball over his left shoulder and straight into Di Losa's path. Di Losa was in the clear and chested the ball down before picking out the far corner of Aparicio's goal and burying the ball into it with a low shot across the face of the Rochedale 'keeper.

It was no less than the Strikers had deserved, but as so often happens a minute or two later they almost conceded an equaliser from a direct free kick to the Rovers which was saved rather awkwardly by Hall. The ball appeared to bounce off Hall's chest to present an opportunity to the Rovers from the rebound. A goal line clearance saved the day for the home team.

The traffic soon resumed its southerly direction towards the Rovers goal, and another raid down the left finished with the Rovers' Steven Carter getting a vital header to a teasing Eli Gilfedder cross that had reduced Aparicio to a spectator's role and was arrowing its way towards Giallourakis.

The teams went to the break with the Strikers still one goal to the good, and worth more. They had dominated the half, winning nearly every 50/50 challenge. Giallourakis had presented some lively options and appeared to have an almost instinctive understanding with Di Losa, and they had been leading the Rovers defence a merry dance. Meanwhile, at the other end McLaren, Webber and Leach appeared to have Panic and Thomas almost completely subdued.

Strikers supporters were no doubt expecting that a Rovers side that had been scoring goals for fun in recent weeks would spark into life at some stage during the second half, so a one-goal lead was hardly enough to inspire confidence regardless of how well their team had played. Awkward moments were surely ahead somewhere.

Four minutes into the second half, though, the home side was unlucky not to double its lead when, from a direct free-kick about twenty five metres from goal, Waugh produced a curling right-footed shot that had Aparicio diving at full stretch to his right to tip it on to his post.

But while the Strikers began the half searching for their second goal, it was noticeable that their attentiveness to keeping the Rovers out of the game was high, for Gilfedder and Butters were very quick to get back to form a five-man backline with McLaren, Leach and Webber as soon as possession was lost. Desperate though the Rovers might have been desperate to get back on an even keel, they were going to have to work for it. And on the night, they simply were not up to the task.

Fifty-four minutes in, a movement involving Webber and Giallourakis brought Butters into the game deep inside the Rovers' 'red zone' and his high cross found Di Losa at the back post. Di Losa climbed high but could not direct his header downwards and another opportunity produced no addition to the scoreline.

Three minutes later, the Rovers finally produced a shot in anger when Thomas took on McLaren and found enough room to have a crack at goal, but his shot went too high to cause Hall any real anxiety.

Rovers coach, Kieran Cooper, eventually ran out of patience with his side's inability to make any real impact on the Strikers' backline. So he brought on a third forward, Nick Maas, at the expense of defender Ian Hutchison.

This move, which saw the Rovers apparently shift to a 3-4-3 formation was obviously designed to even up the numbers on McLaren, Webber and Leach and unsettle the trio who had taken a stranglehold on Thomas and Panic. But it all soon went wrong.

In the sixty-second minute the Strikers attacked again down the left and, when the ball was squared across to Carloss, the midfielder charged onto it and unleashed a shot which struck a Rovers defender on the edge of the eighteen yard box before falling kindly for Butters out to the right. The young winger wasted no time in smashing it low and hard past Aparicio to make the score 2-0, and there was a definite feeling the Strikers were well on their way to three points.

With his side having struck a mighty blow, Hamilton reacted to Cooper's attacking substitution by bringing off Gilfedder and replacing him with Matthew Bell, who slotted straight into the backline to restore the one-man advantage that had been enjoyed there before Maas's introduction. This was a strong sign of Hamilton's desire to snuff out any fire that remained in the Rovers and deny them the scent of a point that a goal at this juncture might have allowed.

Further substitution were made by both coaches, with Cameron Watson and Josh Sherwood replacing Steven Carter and Cameron Watson for Rochedale, and Michael McEvoy replacing Nathan Carloss for the home side. But the flow of the game continued towards the Rovers' goal.

And soon enough, that was where the ball again nestled in the eighty-second minute. The Strikers won a corner kick on the right which was floated across the six-yard box by Butters to reach Giallourakis, who had positioned himself away from the tall timber and towards the left-hand edge of the penalty area. Giallourakis lofted the ball high with his left foot back towards the far post, where McLaren was lurking to leap high and nod the ball into the net for his second goal since returning to the Strikers from Malaysia.

With the score now 3-0 the home side's fans were in a celebratory mood. Noticeably and understandably, the same could not be said for Cooper, but things were about to get worse for him. As Strikers supporters sang with some conviction that they 'could feel a 4-0 coming on', the fourth goal duly arrived from another corner kick, this time from the left, in the eighty-seventh minute. As the ball came across his six-yard box again, Aparicio came for it. But unfortunately for the Rovers custodian he appeared merely to flap at the high ball and, not for the first time this season, his failure to deal with it presented Di Losa with a simple tap-in for a goal that rubbed salt into the Rovers' already weeping wounds.

For Cooper and his beaten troops, the full-time whistle ended a miserable evening on which the Strikers must have put a sizeable dent into not only their top four aspirations, but also their confidence. But for Bobby Hamilton and his previously goal-shy team, the opposite must have applied. For all but a few brief minutes they had completely bossed a team that has spent much of the past twelve weeks carving up other football teams like tender joints of meat.

While it was hard to think of a Rovers player who could have emerged from this touch-up with his head held high and reputation intact, there was really no player in a yellow shirt who did not contribute strongly to the best performance the Strikers have put in this year. It is hard and probably unnecessary to single out players from a team performance as complete as this one. But if pressed, the outstanding efforts of McLaren and Webber at the back must be acknowledged (the latter won the BSSA's man of the match award), and those of the two young wingers, Butters and Gilfedder, who both covered enormous territory as they attacked and defended with equal attention and effectiveness.

Meanwhile, Hamilton must have been impressed and pleased with the contribution of Giallourakis, whose pace and presence of mind presented the Strikers with many more attacking options than they have been used to, and Di Losa, who looked much more mobile and confident last night than in recent weeks.