(Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

It's 15:11 on a sunny Saturday afternoon at Anfield, Liverpool, and the Fernando Torres show starts.

Hull City were the visitors to Anfield, and sitting second bottom of the Premiership, there should be a huge gulf in class between the Tigers and Liverpool who are sitting slightly higher up the totem pole in third place.

However, with the exception of the sublime Spaniard Torres the famous Red were not totally out playing the Tigers. The Hull City team were breaking up the Liverpool attacks fairly easily, but how do you stop a El Nino?

The Tigers' players were like the red neckerchief wearing idiots that run against the Bulls in Pamploma. No matter what you do, you can't really stop that bull. Torres was poetry in motion and all his goals were majestic examples of the goal scoring art, a wonderful first touch to control the ball and a better targeting system than a smart missile.

With the exception of Senor Torres, the Hull City team dealt fairly well with the rest of the Liverpool team for the first hour of the game but then up crops Steven Gerrard.

Gerrard, who had been securely ensconced in Kevin Kilbane's and George Boateng's pockets for the best part of an hour, escaped his aging and tiring minders and produced what Liverpool fans are calling a wonder goal no less, a piece of pure Gerrard genius.

Neutrals and Hull City fans alike have been less effusive of his goal. A lucky strike or a fluky goal is the general consensus from the non-Liverpool footballing world.

Which ever way you look at it, the wonderful Torres hat trick and a goal from Gerrard totally killed off the Tigers. They had fought valiantly against last season's runners up and were still in the game at the half but fell away tired and dejected after Gerrard's killer strike.

The Liverpool team greatly changed from the starting line up over run the lacklustre Tigers but only managed to score two more goals against the East Yorkshire team that were so abjectly pedestrian it is a bigger shock that Liverpool didn't get into double figures. Maybe, it demonstrates more that devoid of Torres and Gerrard the Reds are not much better than a mid table team.

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