Andover 5 Gosport Borough 0

Gosport were playing in yellow and blue, but it was Andover's fans who must have felt it was just like watching Brazil.

If you didn't know the Jewson Wessex league, you'd have sworn Andover were the team 18 points ahead of Gosport after the battering they meted out to Borough at the Portway on Saturday.

It was a victory that was clinical, overwhelming and, most surprisingly of all, comfortable, as goals from Danny Sullivan, Dean Cole, Sam Rea and Justin Bennett made Gosport look like a Sunday league side. At times Andover played with four up front as second-placed Borough were humiliated in their worst defeat of the year.

Sullivan got the Lions on their way with a superb volley on four minutes as he met Vince Rusher's cross perfectly, then just missed out on a carbon copy five minutes later. Andover launched an all-out assault on Geoff Sim's goal, which bore more fruit on 18 minutes as Cole latched on to a good pass from Paul Hughes and rode two tackles before smashing the ball home. The in-form striker got another on the half-hour as Sullivan did well to rescue the ball from the byline and Cole volleyed beautifully home.

Gosport, for their part, offered nothing. They were smothered down the flanks and couldn't pump the ball up for their forwards, and you really had to wonder how they managed to reach second in the division on this display.

But that takes nothing away from the excellence with which Andover dispatched them. To a man, the Lions gave it everything, competing for the football right up to the end. With Sim struggling with an injury, Andover scored twice more. Rea's quick turn and fine finish emphasised his growing confidence, and Bennett's similar sharpness in front of goal just before the end gave the Lions an undreamt-of scoreline against Borough, whose fans saw their team's title chances drifting away as the afternoon progressed.

In the end, it was Andover who looked like the title-chasers. Gosport may have been out of sorts, but the home side were good for their five-goal victory, and could have had even more, as Kevin Reacord's excellent late strike was turned over.

There wasn't a man in a red-and-black shirt who didn't have a great game on Saturday, and this Andover side are already firing a warning shot to next year's title contenders.