EPL Talk » Darren Bent

Fantasy League – Valued Players To Buy

Kevin Coleman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:48:52 +0000

Looking for bargain players below the top price in each position? There are some great valued players to be had if you’re looking to free up some cash for that “big” signing. Kevin picks out two from each position and tells you why you should be investing in these great valued players.

Joe Hart (BI) – Birmingham’s on loan goalkeeper has already made four clean sheets, plus gathering a number of save points. With his next three games being Bolton, Burnley and Arsenal he is most certainly one of the best valued #1’s around, at just 4.1.

Thomas Sorensen (SC)- Like Hart, Sorensen is 4.1 but has racked up the same number of points after four clean sheets, two bonus points and a number of save points to boot. Stoke’s next three fixtures are Manchester Utd, Everton and West Ham, so caution over whether or not you feel he can score points.

Richard Dunne (AV) - Dunne’s price has gone up 0.2 since his move from Manchester City, and he’s now 5.2 which is still a great bargain. He’s played two games with Villa, and has helped them to two clean sheets, as well as scoring four bonus points in these two games. Get in quickly, you won’t find many better scorers at such a good rate, his price is only going to go up and up.

Joseph Yobo (EV) – After their dreadful start to the season, Yobo price plummeted to 5.8 – like a number of Everton players. With the Goodison ship now steadied, and the trio of Portsmouth, Stoke and Wolves coming up over the next few weeks Yobo will be a certain tip to pick up some valuable clean sheet points, and maybe even a goal.

Yossi Benayoun (LI) – After a quiet start to the season, Yossi’s price went down before shooting back up to 7.6 post-Burnley hat trick. The Israeli midfielder seems to have finally secured himself a starting eleven berth at Liverpool, and his dancing feet will most certainly pick up more goals and more assists as the season goes on.

James Milner (AV) – Milner’s price dropped to 6.9, but after picking up a fantastic 14 points last weekend against Portsmouth his value will go back up to 7.0 before the week is over. Milner has taken on penalty kick duties after the departure of Gareth Barry and Ashley Young’s misses, as well as playing a key role across the midfield. Expect more goals and assists from James over the course of thes season.

Darren Bent (SU) – Just look no further. After starting the season at 7.0, Darren is currently available at a whopping 7.4 – so there’s a big chance someone else in your league has him too. But after five goals, he’s become a bit of a necessity because you can’t get a cheaper striker on such hot form. His clinical finishing is sure to continue, and his price is going to keep rising, so fi you’ve a striker around the same price no scoring goals, get Bent in.

Craig Bellamy (MC) - This is an odd one, but Bellamy has been on superb form this season despite the arrival of Emmanuel Adebayor and Carlos Tevez to City’s attack. He scored a fantastic brace last weekend against United, and with the suspension to Adebayor expect Bellamy to start the next couple of games. If he survives any FA charges after his “incident” last week, he might be a shrewd move and I doubt many other managers in your league would have him at 7.9

You can read more from Kevin over on his football site, Back Page Football, plus much more. If you’d like to get involved their, shoot him an email.

Why Can’t David Healy Score In The Premiership

Paul Bestall — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:52:58 +0000

If you were your country’s top scorer with a healthy 35 goals in 73 appearances, chances are you’d be an established top league player in most countries in Europe. Add to that record a career that has seen you start out at Manchester United and take in spells at Leeds United, Sunderland and Fulham, you’d expect a pretty good record. Yet, if that player was David Healy, you’d be scratching your head.

Here’s a man who scored a hat trick against Spain in September 2006. In fact, during qualifying matches for the 2008 European Championships, Healy bagged an incredible 13 goals in 12 games, making him the top scorer in qualifying for the tournament. Yet in the last 18 months he’s scored just 2 Premier League goals in 20 matches and his time at Sunderland has seen him struggle to maintain a place in the starting line up.

His time under Roy Keane never really took off and when Keane walked out after spending the best part of £100 million to make a team worse, his replacement, Ricky Sbragia preferred pragmatism to striking options and played with only Kenwyne Jones up front. As he’s just turned 30, is it too late for him to force himself into Steve Bruce’s plans? With Darren Bent joining over the summer, Healy has yet to play any Premiership football so far this season.

Healy has almost had the reversal of some players careers, in that he is so prolific at international level, but so inconsistent at domestic level. How is it that someone can score 35 goals against sides such as Sweden, Spain and Denmark, yet struggle to score more than 15 goals in a league season? He’s managed that feat only once, in 2003-04 when he was at Preston and currently has scored a total of 90 goals in English domestic football.

He’s the only player to score a hat trick twice for Northern Ireland; even George Best never managed that, but only scored one in league football. I doubt I can remember a striker with such a strange record in the modern era. When he joined Fulham in 2007, it was supposedly the move that would finally see Healy establish himself as a top flight striker but he only scored 4 Premier League goals for the Cottagers. He hit two in his first two league appearances, so then hit 2 in another 28 games.

How is it possible? I don’t understand it at all. When you look at someone who was the complete opposite, Ian Wright, who was so prolific at league level but only scored 9 goals for England in 31 games. Or even Andrew Cole, with just one international goal to his name in 15 games but 289 throughout his domestic career.

Healy has the talent, his international record cannot be a continual series of flukes spread over a series of years. If anything, the early part of his international career could be written off, as Northern Ireland struggled to win any game for nearly16 matches and two years between 2002 and 2004. His international career is currently going through a similar spell, with only 1 goal in his last 12 appearances. No doubt a hangover from his domestic struggles but Healy is an international footballing enigma.

The question is can he finally find the right relationship with Steve Bruce at Sunderland to finally ignite the touch paper under his career? Northern Ireland’s fans will be hoping he can find his form as soon as possible.Unfortunately they need him to be in form right now, but the next match could see him end his bad run and if he ever needed to do it, now is the time.

Wednesday night sees them entertain the group leaders Slovakia and a win will put Northern Ireland top of the group and just one game away from a return to the World Cup for the first time since 1986 and wouldn’t that be a phenomenal achievement.

Darren Bent’s Rant Goes A-Twitter

Ethan Armstrong — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:57:00 +0000

When I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was a dirty verb, like: “Get Twittered!” or “Go Twitter yourself!” (And maybe there’s still potential for that.) Turns out it’s a social networking website. And it has undeniably become the Next Big Net Thing.

In addition to allowing friends to keep up with each other’s day-to-day goings-on, all kinds of organizations from restaurants to sporting clubs to Ashton Kutcher are learning to use its free marketing potential to promote themselves. EPL Talk’s own The Gaffer uses it to keep folks current with our site’s updates.

But alongside the benefits, there’s plenty of room for error as well. Controversy arose this week when Tottenham Hotspur’s Darren Bent used Twitter to vent his frustration over stalled transfer talks. He reportedly posted the following items on his Twitter account:

“Why can’t anything be simple? It’s so frustrating hanging around doing jack s**t. Seriously getting p***ed off now.”

“Do I want to go to Hull City, no. Do I want to go to Stoke, no.”

“Do I want to go to Sunderland, yes. So stop f*****g around, Levy.”

There was speculation it wasn’t really Bent’s account (I was hoping it would prove to be Steve Bruce’s), but today Bent owned up to his posts when he apologized on Tottenham’s official site:

“I appreciate that transfers are seldom straightforward and are often complex. However, after a long period of waiting following my withdrawal from the plane to China, I had become incredibly frustrated by the time these things take and I posted inappropriate comments on my Twitter site.

“I allowed my emotions to get in the way of my better judgement. I regret my actions and did not intend to offend Daniel Levy or anyone with the nature or the content of my posting.”

Bent’s retraction aside, does this mean Twitter will play a bigger role in our football media terrain? Will we see players and managers using Twitter to wind each other up? Complain about refereeing decisions? Flush out transfer speculation? Will we be reading articles every week about professional football Tweets?

The possibilities are endless…

A_Zaki: I was completely onside. Linesman was drunk. Time to sulk.

RafaBeni: Getting nervous. Bought Xabi case of Rioja in case he’s on fence.

Fergie99: TiVo’ed Rafa’s latest press conference. Hoping for rant pt 2.

BexInLA: Took Landon bowling to ease tension. Kicked his arse. Oops.

City_Hughes: Players in place. Time to shop for chemistry.

J_Barton: Anybody know a good lawyer?

In 1998, when I started going to the University of New Hampshire, AOL Instant Messenger was the big rage. We were bent over our computers all hours of the day, keeping up with old friends from home and getting to know new ones at school. I remember many the awkward moments and endless misunderstandings that come too easily with such brief, faceless, voiceless interaction. We learned some big lessons. Like: sarcasm is hard to convey over the internet. And: always talk about the big issues in person. Eventually, we succumbed to communicating using the away message function (the message one left when away from Instant Messanger: at the library… at the dining hall… surfing for porn…) in an attempt to avoid the real-time electronic faux pas. These “status updates” became the template for today’s Tweets.

Later, this desire for online social networking gave birth to sites like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. Each one seemed to catch on for a while before getting knocked off the perch by the next. But Twitter seems to reach all the way back to Instant Messenger and amplify that concept to a mass scale.

Bent’s comments might have once been some quiet griping to personal friends. No story there. But today it gets broadcast the world over. Anyone who’s paying attention gets wind of his complaints. And it ends up on all the media sites as the controversy du jour.

As we demand more and more information in shorter and shorter bursts, it’s easy to get caught in the stream. The lesson those in the public arena need to learn—similar to what we students learned at University long ago—is despite the ease of transmission, you need to watch your words. Now more than ever. The world is potentially listening.

Oh, by the way… keep an eye my upcoming can’t-live-without-it social networking site: TweetMySpaceBookster.com™. It’s going to be huge. Coming soon to a laptop near you.

Resurgent Tottenham Surprise Everyone

Dominic Mather — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:26:21 +0000

Tottenham started the season as serious contenders to break into the top four, but as we all know this was not to be. The joke “What’s the difference between Spurs and a triangle?…A triangle has more points” was going on into late October, and until the last few weeks Tottenham looked like the favorites to be relegated.

Tottenham’s losses at the both of the newly promoted clubs they faced compounded their failure and made, now former Tottenham manager, Juande Ramos’ future look increasingly more uncertain. The departure of Ramos from White Hart Lane signaled a huge change in this attitude; whilst Ramos was at the helm Jonathan Woodgate came out to the press and admitted that there was a good chance that Spurs would be relegated. Woodgate’s pessimism showed the negative attitude around the Tottenham camp and around Ramos.

When Harry ‘Houdini’ Redknapp was brought in to stop the rot this defeatist attitude was immediately arrested and the performances instantaneously picked up; he seemed to inspire the players into working for him. Darren Bent had been Ramos’ top goal scorer and had scored four by late October, since Redknapp’s arrival Bent has had the purple patch of his Tottenham career and has scored seven goals in five games and Pavlyuchenko seems to have come a lot closer to realising his potential, scoring four goals in the same period.Tottenham have recovered from their early losses to win twice over Liverpool, and came close to beating Arsenal in a four goal apiece thriller. Who knows; if they keep on beating the big names they may yet reach the top four.

Tottenham 4-0 Dinamo Zagreb: Video Highlights

The Gaffer — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:18:33 +0000

Video highlights of Spurs earlier in the season would have been filed in the Horror category, but their performances of late can be found under the Best Seller section, such is the way Tottenham are playing. Harry Redknapp has turned the side into world beaters especially after their convincing 4-0 win against Dinamo Zagreb in the UEFA Cup.

Darren Bent emerged as an unlikely hero after working incredibly hard to score a hat trick. Luka Modric had a wonderful game right behind Bent in attack, and the pair created plenty of chances as did Aaron Lennon on the right and David Bentley on the left.

Other than the performance by Spurs, I was very impressed by the away support of Dinamo Zagreb, the Croatian side. For almost the entire 90 minutes, the away fans were louder than the home fans. They kept on singing loudly with an unmistakeable deep Croatian voice. In the first half, it sounded like they were singing a version of “Yellow Submarine.” And right before the first half whistle, I could have sworn they were chanting “3,000 nutcases” over and over again.

Three thousand nutcases they were as the Dinamo Zagreb fans literally set White Hart Lane on fire with flames that were thrown into the away section. Smoke from the flares swept across the pitch at times. Sure, it created a great atmosphere but the Tottenham officials must have been concerned about the safety of the away and home fans.

Here are the video highlights of Spurs 4, Dinamo Zagreb 0:

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