The Hull City juggernaut continues to cut a swathe through the Championship, after three bottom of the table clubs it is now top five side Watford's turn to take a Tigery pasting as City consolidate third spot.

Report by Steve Weatherill.

In which we did everything right.

Scored early. Scored again soon after. Dominated the play, displayed a commanding attitude of confident control all game long, won individual battles all over the pitch. Scored another one late on and eased down. Sent subdued opponents slinking home in dismay and despair - opponents who, according to the League Table, are and remain serious adversaries for a promotion place.

Utterly superb.

A Circle that was packed full except for a handful of seats at the front of the West Stand and generous patches of desert among the paltry Watford support greeted a 4-4-2 marked by the return from injury of Wayne Brown, occupying the spot vacated by the reclaimed Neil Clement:

ApMyhill
Ricketts Turner Brown Dawson
Garcia Ashbee Marney Pedersen
Windass Campbell

First minute, we attack North Stand, free-kick on the right given rather generously by referee Rennie for a soft one on Garcia, Marney strokes the ball in towards the penalty-spot, Turner rises, glances it past keeper Lee's right hand. Into the net.

As easy as that. As confident as that.

Watford, big, ugly, aerially powerfully, had been undone by a move they would have recognised and admired. Simple and direct. And devastatingly effective.

Our beauty is that we can attack from all sides, at all speeds, in all ways. We can do set pieces, we can do fast passing, we can do long range shooting, we can do goalpoaching. That is why lately we've not simply been beating teams, we've been dismissing them with plenty to spare. Trouncing them. Good word, trounce.

This is Watford's fate too. A trouncing.

On 3 they win a corner (wooo!), but make no headway even though we defend it a bit sloppily. On 5, up the other end, an urgent backpass plea is refused by Mr Rennie who insists (with Billy Bowden style actions) that the ball came off the Watford defender's knee. He's right, but the panic among the visiting defence to get the ball away, anywhere, rather than try and pass it around is clear. The reason? Fraizer Campbell. They are terrified of him. His pace, his change of direction, his vision, his utterly ruthless commitment to hunting down slack defenders dallying on the ball. What a player. What an attitude.

On 12 we put the game beyond doubt. Garcia shows excellent strength to provide a platform for a powerful move from right to left, the ball is played into the box and, towards the back of it, Pedersen lurks, connects with a low left-foot shot and Campbell, showing brilliant instinct, applies a toe-end to the flashing ball and diverts it past the helpless Lee.

2-0, dangerous lead? Dangerous opponents surely, Watford? Not a bit of it. Not to this supreme Hull City side. Watford are notorious for imposing their lumpen hoofing style on their opponents, crushing the joy out of football (and in turn withering the interest in the sport among the good folk of Hertfordshire). But they are simply unable to pull that trick against us. In fact, it's working the other way round: it is the Tigs that are dictating the pattern of play, a fluent, passing treat of a pattern. One that Watford cannot hope to match. And so are the visitors reduced to catatonic despair.

It's a greying afternoon with rain on the way. City are shimmering with scarcely imaginable beauty. The Circle is a-pur.

Keeper Lee loses control of the ball near the edge of his box and, panicking, realises Fraizer Campbell is sprinting to intercept. Lee gets there first, just ahead of a perfectly fair challenge from our boy. It wasn't even a foul. But Uriah books Campbell.

I am in fact a bit of a fan of Uriah Rennie. I first ran across him fully twenty years ago, in the Northern Premier League, when he was by a distance the fittest man on the pitch and the programme's boast that his hobbies were marathon running and kick boxing seemed an utterly plausible upgrade on the more orthodox preference for gardening and D-I-Y. I know his decision-making has always been a bit erratic and I know he does enjoy the occasional moment demanding that he be regarded as centre of attention. But he is generally decisive (contrast the horrible Andy d'Urso), takes no nonsense from players (contrast the wilbur Mike Riley) and I've never noticed any sign of him favouring the bigger clubs (contrast the late and deeply unlamented Jeff Winter). Uriah was a shade card-happy yesterday, and certainly got the Campbell yellow badly wrong. But neither Fraizer and Uriah were unduly disturbed and simply sensibly got on with the game. Mr Rennie's good enough for me.

So is Fraizer Campbell.

Clumsy Watford. Elegant City. On 39 the visitors serve up their first and only decent slice of football of the whole half as a right foot shot from the edge of the box delivered by the industrious McAnuff challenges Myhill to make a diving stop. Our Welsh internationalist gracefully obliges.

Half-time, 2-0.

Remember Watford here two seasons ago? They beat us 2-1, and looked just a bit too canny, a bit too powerful and a bit too well-organised for us to cope with. They got promoted to the Premiership. And came back down again. Earlier this season we went to Vicarage Road and though there wasn't much between the teams in a poor sort of a game it was Watford that took the points by virtue of the solitary moment of genuine quality in the whole 90 minutes, an impressively decisive strike by Marlon King. Things change. Look at the two clubs in March 2008. Progress, and plenty of it. We're the masters now.

Second half, same as the first, a little bit louder and in Watford's case a little bit worse.

On 48 Dawson cuts in from the right, from where he'd a moment ago taken a corner, but shoots too high. On 53 Watford finally threaten some mayhem with their celebrated and grotesquely ugly long-throw routine, but a thumping Ricketts boot clears the danger eight yards from our goal. On 56 Watford boss Boothroyd makes a double substitution, and in a stunning admission of abject failure, invites the sublimely ponderous Danny Shittu to go up front.

O, weep tears of misery for the vanishing art of the target man. Alan Gilzean, Uwe Seeler, Klaus Fischer, Eusebio, Marco Van Basten and Andy Lochhead. Players of power but also intelligence, rarely beaten in the air but able to pass and dribble at will too if the game needs to be played on the floor. Danny Shittu as makeshift centre-forward. He can't run, he can't turn, he can't pass. The poor man looked like a bluebottle stuck in treacle. With a haunted look on his face he stumbled around, desperately hoping none of his team-mates would slip a deft through ball behind our defence and expect him to read it and chase it. He could no more read and chase a through ball than he could whisk up a Swiss fondue on the coach going home. Happily he was spared any such indignity since this Watford side simply don't do and can't do deft through balls, or deft anything else for that matter. Poor Shittu. Marooned far from his comfortable centre back home he was left brooding, isolated and morose, like a rusting oil tanker run aground besmirching a sparkling sandy beach.

On the hour Deano takes a hugely well-earned rest and is replaced by Folan. Who could have scored just four minutes later when Fraizer Campbell sizzles through the defence and shoots against Lee when a square ball across the box to the unattended Folan might have been the better call. (I'm just saying. I'm not criticising Fraizer. I know my place, I know my limits.)

Terrific stuff, now. We are playing wonderfully well. We'd have been wrong to downplay the savage dismantling of So'ton, ColU and Leicester solely on the basis that they are all slithering down towards the wrong end of the table, but even so all three clubs are evidently in distress. But Watford are obviously proper promotion contenders. And here we are, hammering them.

And soon it is 3-0. A goal that Caleb Folan should treasure. Pace, power, determination, high-class finishing. Folan forces his way down the middle and he is not going to be stopped, by fair means or fouled. He has almost been hauled right down onto the turf by the time he decides to shoot, but he's not minded to be halted. He bundles the ball past Lee and it rolls happily into the net.

Folan came to us seven months ago as a million quid's worth of sheer pace. You can now add in strong determination, decent link-up play and an increasing awareness around goal. Value has been added - in his basic footballing contribution and in his attitude. Something is going very very right in the coaching being performed at our club.

Watford now had Kabba sent off for a nasty foul on Ricketts born of glum despair, but we could have allowed them 12, not 10, men, and their cupboard would still've been bare. For we are now contemptuously rampant. Granite-hard at the back, flowing in midfield, grace and power on the flanks, terrifyingly inspired in attack. Wha's like us? Damn few and they're a' in the Premiership.

All this and Craig Fagan too!

On 87 Campbell comes off, to a massive ovation though one still far short of what the maestro deserves, and on sprints battlehardened Premiership star Craig Fagan. Words are not enough!

There were some tired and creaking legs out there by now. Ashbee was toiling and was allowed a breather right at the end (a cameo for Hughes). Pedersen looked shattered to me, while Mr Brown later revealed that Wayne Brown and Andy Dawson had both also been suffering. But they managed, and heroically too. Two weeks rest now will be a blessed help.

There are three added minutes and at the end of them Watford have an attack, though our defence blocks it, and then Myhill saves a free-kick. I expect the Watford fans were pleased with this final show of defiance from their team. At least, I expect the seven of then left in the ground were. The rest had been streaming away steadily since half-way through the second half and were probably South of Doncaster by now.

At full-time it seemed impossibly perfect, as we had won and won well, while no other side in the top five had managed better than a draw. Impossibly perfect it turned out to be, as both West Brom and Bristol City squeaked stoppage-time winners. Whatever. We've just won 7 from 9 nine games and in most cases the wins have involved utterly convincing flayings. It has never been as good as this in our club's history, not at the sharp end of the season in this Division, hitherto the summit of our ambitions. Oddly enough, as we journeyed home through the rain, I felt able to shrug off with a smile the patronising noise burbling from the disgraceful waste of taxpayers' money that is Radio 5 - the whiny Norwich fan telling us that whoever gets promoted will have no chance of survival next season (17th placed Norwich? Like that's any of your business), the despicably self-regarding Alan Green and his acolytes expressing persistent astonishment at the presence of Hull City in 3rd position, as if someone is going to demand a recount and discover that actually a mistake's been made and we've only got 48 not 68 points after all. Watford manager Aidy Boothroyd was perhaps the best post-match interviewee though. He sounded as if he was about to burst into tears. Yet another manager who can't quite believe that his team has been royally viciously and authoritatively decimated by Hull City. Or perhaps he was just a bit upset that when the new Premiership season comes around he won't be able to go buying packets of stickers containing any of his players. I, however, am rather looking forward to a trip to my local newsagents in early August. I shall pay my threepence (or whatever they cost nowadays, it's 1972 that I last did this), I shall eagerly tear open the packet, and I shall gleefully inspect the grinning gobs within ... Fernando Torres (not got!), Dimitar Berbatov (got!), Ashley Cole (git!), Ian Ashbee (ooooo!!) ...

HULL CITY (4-4-2): Myhill; Ricketts, Turner, Brown, Dawson; Garcia, Ashbee, Marney, Pedersen; Campbell, Windass.  Subs: Folan (for Windass, 59), Fagan (for Campbell, 87), Hughes (for Ashbee, 89), Walton, Duke.

Goals: Turner 1; Campbell 13; Folan 73

Booked: Brown, Campbell, Myhill

Sent Off: None

WATFORD: Lee, Bromby, Shittu, DeMerit, Sadler, Smith, Bangura, Williamson, McAnuff, Kabba, Ellington.  Subs: Mariappa (for Bangura, 56), Ainsworth (for Ellington, 56), John (for DeMerit, 79), Stewart, Poom.

Goals: None

Booked: Sadler

Sent Off: Kabba

REFEREE:   U Rennie

ATTENDANCE: 23,501