You have to go back to the 1978/79 season to find the last time Watford scored 11 or more goals in their first three competitive fixtures of the season.

And that was also the last occasion that the first two home matches of the seasons have delivered eight goals or more.

In that 78/79 campaign under Graham Taylor, the Hornets started by beating Brentford 4-0 at home and then 3-1 away in the first round of the League Cup, which in those days was played over two legs.

They followed up with a 4-2 victory at Walsall on the opening day of the league season, and then just for good measure whacked in five more in the fourth game when they thumped Blackpool 5-1 three days later!

That meant GT’s side had scored 11 in their first three matches of the season, 16 in their first four, and nine of them came in opening two home games.

However, if it’s goal gluts in the first games of a season that rock your boat then you needed to be alive at the turn of the last century.

That’s because in three out of five seasons, Watford scored 18 goals or more in their first three games of the season!

In 1898/99, they opened with 20 goals in three games, including a 15-0 opening-day win over Wycombe Wanderers in the Bucks and Contigious Counties League Division One!

A season later they notched 19, with a 10-0 win over Aylesbury United in the second game of the season in the same competition.

And in 1903/04, Watford’s first three games saw them net 18, featuring a 9-0 thrashing of Wycombe Wanderers again, this time in the Southern League Division Two, with Harry Barton scoring six.

Meanwhile, while Tom Ince already has a hat-trick and Edo Kayembe has three goals to his name, they are some way short of the goalscoring achievements of the players in those three seasons.

In the 1898/99 campaign, Charlie Hare, Tuggy Beach and Johnny Hill each scored hat-tricks during the first three games of the season; a year later Hare repeated the feat along with Bobbie Slaughter; then, in the 1903/04 season, both Bertie Banks and Barton completed hat-tricks in the first trio of fixtures.

Indeed, in that 1903/04 season, Barton scored 10 in the first three matches on his way to 33 goals in 32 outings.

The last two Watford players to score three or more goals in the opening three games of a season were Troy Deeney and Gabriele Angella in 2013/14.

Deeney scored four, including the winner at Birmingham on the opening day and then a hat-trick as the Hornets trounced Bournemouth 6-1 at Vicarage Road.

Angella scored twice in that romp against the Cherries, having also netted four days earlier in a 3-1 League Cup win over Bristol Rovers.

Statistics courtesy of the wfc.net database of Watford information.