GRAZIANO Pelle’s sensational start to life at Saints has seen him rewrite the club’s record books.

The 29-year-old’s double strike in the 8-0 hammering of Sunderland last week took his league tally to six Premier League goals in just eight games.

Pelle, whose £8m arrival from Feyenoord in the summer is already looking a bargain, is the third top scorer in the English top flight.

Only five other men in the Spanish, Italian, German and French elite leagues have scored more league goals than he has this season.

That list includes footballing mega-stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar.

And only one striker has ever plundered more goals in the same timeframe for Saints in post-war football than the Italian international has done.

That was Colin Clarke, who scored seven goals in his first eight First Division games for Saints at the start of 1986/87.

Clarke’s tally was boosted by a hat-trick on his debut against QPR and the Northern Ireland international also netted three times on his ninth appearance, against Newcastle at The Dell.

Two other Saints also scored six times in their first eight league games for the club, but none of them were in the top flight.

Charlie Wayman netted his goals in 1947/48 en route to a 17-goal seasonal haul in the Second Division. And Jimmy Shields, a £1,000 signing from Sunderland in the summer of 1956, struck his goals in the 1956/57 Division 3 South campaign.

Pelle this week saw his odds slashed by a leading bookmaker to 30/1 third favourite to finish as the Premier League’s top scorer.

Only Chelsea’s Diego Costa and Sergio Aguero of Manchester City, who have both bagged nine league goals so far, have lower odds.

Both Costa and Aguero, though, currently trail the extraordinary Cristiano Ronaldo in the race to finish with the European Golden Shoe for the continent’s highest-scoring marksman.

The Real Madrid star has belted a staggering 15 goals in his opening seven La Liga matches of 2014/15, including a four-goal haul and two three-goal shows.

Ronaldo was joint top last season in the Golden Shoe standings with Liverpool’s Luis Suarez.

The Portuguese winger has won the Golden Shoe three times, but bizarrely his best-ever seasonal haul – 46 La Liga goals for Madrid in 2011/12 – only saw him finish runner-up that season.

That was because Barcelona’s Lionel Messi struck 50 times!

Those are the two highest seasonal totals to win either the Golden Shoe or its predecessor the European Golden Boot since the award was inaugurated in the late 1960s.