Darrent Bent Deserves His England Opportunity

If Theo Walcott had scored 22 goals for Arsenal this season, he would be being hailed as the saviour of English football and his place on the plane to South Africa would be guaranteed. Darren Bent has scored 22 goals for struggling Sunderland this season, yet he appears destined for disappointment when Fabio Capello announces his final squad.

Walcott travelled to the last World Cup despite never having made a single Premiership appearance, yet Bent is consistently overlooked when it comes to squad selection for major international tournaments.

If Bent was a 19-year-old, he would have all the English Champions League-chasing teams after him and would be guaranteed a place in England's starting lineup. But Bent is no longer a teenager. In fact, he has been scoring Premiership goals for so long that his presence amongst the top-scoring strikers in the Premiership can almost be taken for granted. And Bent would be forgiven for thinking that he all too often it is.

Among the more prestigious Premiership strikers to have scored less goals than Darren Bent this season are Carlos Tevez, Fernando Torres, and Jermain Defoe, yet there is no great clamour for Bent's participation on Capello's final party.

Bent's problem is that he is not fashionable.

Michael Owen set the world alight as a teenager and the world will never forget it. No matter how many injury-hit, inconsistent seasons he has, Owen is destined to remain forever fashionable.

Compared to Owen, a product of the Liverpool academy who broke into the first team at aged 17, Bent came up the hard way, cutting his teeth first at Ipswich Town and then at Charlton Athletic.

His 31 goals in 68 appearances for Charlton prompted Tottenham to splash out £16.5 million for his services. Despite competing with Dimitar Berbatov, Robbie Keane, and Jermain Defoe for a starting spot and making only sporadic first team appearances, Bent still managed to score 12 goals.

The following season he finished as Tottenham's top goal scorer but despite this he was deemed surplus to requirements by Harry Redknapp. Steve Bruce promptly snapped Bent up for what in hindsight was a bargain basement £10 million, and the striker has effectively paid back every penny by single-handedly scoring more league goals for the side than the rest of the squad have managed between them.

When Wayne Rooney scores less than 15 goals a season no one seems to notice because Rooney, despite being only two years younger than Bent, is still regarded as a prospect. Unlike Rooney, Bent has never been afforded the luxury of being allowed time to improve, he is expected to deliver season after season. And inevitably, he does.

Imagine how many goals Bent would have scored if he had been playing for high-flying Man Utd., who consistently create far more goal scoring chances than struggling Sunderland.

It is unfair to accuse Bent of not being good enough to score goals at the very highest level, in the Champions League or International tournaments, because he has never had a chance to prove himself in either. When he was given the second of his two starts for the national side against Brazil last November, Bent must have been relishing the chance to compete on a team containing world class players for arguably the first time in his life.

Unfortunately, he was denied this opportunity when Capello chose to rest almost his entire his first choice team. England were subsequently outclassed by Brazil, and Bent can be forgiven for failing to find the net in a 1-0 defeat.

Unfortunately for Bent, everyone within the game, ranging from England managers to the most casual of football fans, seems to share the belief that for some reason Bent is not a world class player. It seems no amount of Premiership goals is going to change that damaging perception.

Bent is nothing if not a goal scoring striker. He offers little besides goals, a trait he shares with fellow England internationals Jermain Defoe and Michael Owen. This means that when it comes to assessing what sort of a season these players have had, one glance as the goalscoring charts is all that is required.

Whereas judging the relative merits of footballers in other positions will always be highly subjective, the effectiveness of players like Defoe, Owen, and Bent can and should be measured according to this one vital statistic.

By the time the Premiership season draws to a close Darren Bent will probably have scored 25 goals. I doubt whether there is a single striker who will score this quantity of goals in a top European league and still be overlooked by their country when it comes to World Cup selection.

Until Bent has been truly tried and tested, we will never know whether he is good enough to score goals at an elite international level. But he has earned the right to take that test.