Ruben Selles called for his Hull City team to deliver a statement performance at Sheffield United, and he couldn't have wished for more as his side roared to a convincing 3-0 win against the automatic promotion hopefuls.

An early Matt Crooks goal set City on their way to a famous Bramall Lane victory and though the Tigers had to withstand long periods of set-piece pressure, that was eased in the second half when Matty Jacob and Joao Pedro stepped off the bench to seal an impressive victory.

The result moves City up and out of the bottom three ahead of the weekend action, with Selles notching a third straight-away victory and a clean sheet.

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"I think that's a statement performance obviously the victory, it comes with the performance," the delighted Spaniard told Hull Live at Bramall Lane. "We were very solid in the things that we did.

"I know there are some good things in this team. We have been talking about that, and I expected my team to have character and play the game in the way that we wanted. I think we saw all of these things today.

"We have been talking about getting the key moments of the game on our side, and then I think that's what we did today, sometimes when you play against a really good team like Sheffield United, if you come with the initiative of just being low and waiting for things to happen, you're not going to get anything so we showed that we can go and press them higher in the pitch, but they have qualities that sometimes break our press and then we need to become lower in the pitch to defend. We did it excellently, and then we took our moments. We saw that robustness, which I really like."

City had to defend their box well at times, with United launching a host of balls into their box from set-plays, but stood firm, and limited the hosts to just two efforts on target, neither of which stretched the returning Ivor Pandur.

"They have a massive amount of set pieces that we defended really well, and we are becoming the team that can cope with those moments," he continued. "We knew that in those moments, it was difficult to beat us there, but we also knew that we would have some space from those situations. We just played the action brilliantly. We followed up.

"It's not easy when the action goes really quick for everyone to follow; I think Matt Crooks followed perfectly and then finding that the strike and being ahead early in the game just allowed us to be a little bit more free and play the game that we wanted to play.

"I don't see any team coming here and not having a difficult period in the game, and you can expect that; we have the same coming when we played Leeds United; it's the same kind of thing against the teams at the top.

"If you are going to beat them, then you need to be excellent, and you know sometimes you will need to defend a little bit more than in some other games, and we did it. We were ready for the challenge, and I think the boys' application was excellent."