Darren Bent Rules

I’ve often felt sorry for David James. That season … you know, the one where he kept the most clean sheets of any keeper in England and conceded fewer goals?  He also made two high profile errors so that end-of-season football Oscar nomination soon disappeared as he starred in ‘Calamity James’.

After that, let’s not forget, he still had a grand career before him, he was England’s number one keeper for long spells, he won a thing or two. Actually, two. OK, he isn’t the greatest keeper ever, he has made some mistakes but neither is he the accident-waiting-to-happen that he has been labelled as since.  The perception of poor old Dave will be, forever, ‘Calamity James’.

Ask any pleb why and ‘well, he makes loads of mistakes don’t he?’  Well, no, not really. He made as many mistakes that season as the brilliant Petr Cech makes every season. That Petr Cech who is a coward, right? And there’s another pearl of conventional wisdom.  Petr Cech is not a coward. He still goes in. He might pick his battles with more care but then HE’S HAD HIS FACE SMASHED IN.

OK, I am keeper, let’s drag this away from goalkeepers. Perception. Perception is everything and, often, it’s bollocks.

Some players are perceived as ‘good footballers’. The thinking football fan knows a ‘good footballer’. Indeed, they luuurve ‘good footballers’. These footballers, regardless of effort or attainment are ‘better’ than other mere footballers. Messi and Iniesta are the gods of ‘good football’ but it only takes one broadsheet hack to post a clip of an Eastern European teenager backheeling a goal and the perception of that player is established forEVER as a ‘good footballer’.

The sub-footballer might only be able to throw a ball a long way, hit ‘row Z’, run fast or only pass short, having first had to ‘take a touch’, of course. And, while sub-footballer is taking that touch, ‘good footballer’ is dribbling around him ten times, exchanging one-twos with most of his team mates, retaining possession for 37 passes and scoring twice. There is no middle ground these days. Rubbish or brilliant. Genius or troglodyte.

As annoying as those perceptions are, the one that really winds me up is ‘not good enough for England’. One of the reasons that it winds me up is very personal. Personal because I use it and am as guilty as the next man. At a certain point in time, I said ‘Gary Pallister is not good enough for England’.  At another point, I said ‘Oh, come on, Steve Guppy is NOT good enough for England’. But maybe I was wrong. Both those players had but one quality, but by jove they were good at that one thing. Why did we not embrace those qualities?

And in that spirit, step forward Darren Bent. Darren Bent is ‘not good enough for England’. The argument in defence of that is that Darren is ‘not a footballer’ but that somewhat overlooks one very glaring fact. The defence of the argument is entirely subjective and grounded in some myth that England are, or can be, a ‘brilliant footballing side’. The glaring fact is entirely objective.

If Bent is ‘not good enough to play for England’, who could Capello choose from to play up front? Well, Rooney is in, that’s a given. Then? Well, the other strikers with some goals in the Premier League this season are Sturridge (9), Defoe (7) and Bent himself (7). Wannabies: Carroll, Agbonlahor, Welbeck and Zamora.

Daniel Sturridge is a ‘good footballer’, zeitgeist England forward, and has scored 23 goals in 74 EPL appearances over the course of five and a half seasons, many as a sub. Danny Welbeck is a ‘good footballer’. He has scored 14 goals in 50 EPL appearances, add on 2 goals in 5 UCL games if you like but that is in three and a half years. In five and a half seasons Andy Carroll has played 117 games and scored 36 goals, only 20 of those have been in the top flight, 11 of those in four months in 2010. Andy was considered a ‘good footballer’ a year or so ago, although sarcastic signs have been spotted in the quality press in recent weeks that suggests his star has waned. Gabby Agbonlahor has 53 goals in 202 games over six seasons and the jury is very much out on whether he’s a good footballer or not. Jermaine Defoe is slightly different to these upstarts, he’s an established pro and opinion on him has varied over the years. Arguably, at present, he’s regaining some lost form. He’s managed 119 EPL goals in 342 games in 10 top flight seasons.

All of these chaps are (or at some point were) more than competent at a lot of things that constitute a ‘good footballer’. But none of them excel at one thing. Certainly, none are consistently heavy goalscorers.

So, back to that glaring fact, the objective one. How does Darren Bent stack up against that lot? Darren Bent is definitely not a ‘good footballer’. But Darren is a goalscorer. He scores lots and has done since 2006. Indeed, Darren Bent is ‘just a goalscorer’ but he is not a ‘good footballer’. This is interesting and a bit of a paradox. The phrase ‘just a goalscorer’ is not a positive one, it overtly acknowledges a player is capable of scoring lots of goals but contributes in no other way. But scoring goals is generally seen as a good thing, they win games. “X doesn’t score as many goals as Y”, is an argument oft used in bar-room disputes, as if the outcome of ‘goals’ is a good thing. But for a player to only contribute goals is, apparently, not enough, they must do more these days. At least, that’s what we’re told.

Darren Bent is just a goalscorer. In little more than six seasons Bent is two goals shy of 100 EPL goals. This he has managed in 224 appearances. This rate of success is better than Rooney’s (130 in 303). This makes Bent the most potent English striker currently playing in the Premier League. He might do sod all else but he’s very good at putting the round thing in the onion bag thing.

When people talk of this ‘good footballer’, of course, what they actually mean is, the player is multi-dimensional, has ‘technical ability’ (a most ethereal description) and can do a wide variety of things to a higher than competent level. This is not Darren Bent. It is also assumed that that good footballer operates within a ‘footballing’ team alongside other ‘good footballers’.

England’s only seriously ‘good footballer’, by consensus, Wayne Rooney, is also very good at that round/oniony thing but, undoubtedly, adds more to any team he plays for than does Bent. He will ‘assist’ others in scoring goals, which Bent won’t often do. Bent, on the other hand, won’t be giving the ball away in important areas. He also won’t be rashly hacking down opposing attackers anywhere near his own box, or getting sent off or injured in important games.

Strikes me that, in English terms, ‘good footballer’ gives you about the same end product as ‘just a goalscorer’, if that footballer is Rooney, but probably less if the footballer is A.N.Other striker.

You can see where I’m going here, surely? England has a ‘good footballer’, he is called Wayne. Do England have any other ‘good’ footballers? Well, this is questionable. Ashley Young is currently seen as one. Barry. Downing. Parker. Milner. Are any of these ‘good enough for England’ in the average schmo’s idea of how football should be played? They certainly wouldn’t make many best XIs. Mine neither. Yet. All regulars. All functional.

Lennon. Walcott. Johnson. All fast, functionally fast, but not ‘good footballers’, and with varying degrees of consistency. Rodwell (raw). Wilshere (injured). ‘Good footballers’? Quite possibly. So, looking at it, England have four ‘good footballers’ one of those is an injured teenager (Ed – actually he turned 20 two weeks ago and is back in training), one has no international or European experience, one is very quick and one is a genius who has a tendency to implode in BIG England games.

What we do have is a whole country full of functional. There is, it seems, plenty of room for functional. Functional makes good footballing sides tick, so why not a functional side? Functional is the top English marksman of the last six years, after all. So, rather than trying to crow bar some ‘good footballers’ into a generally functional bunch of players, why don’t the England hierarchy go full on functional. Embrace functional.

The perception is that international football is the pinnacle of the game and the perception is that England need to play great, technically gifted football to win at it. Two perceptions, both wrong. Internationals are not the peak of world football, the Champions League is. Spain aside, each nation has but a few ‘good footballers’ who get purchased by the best club teams in the world. International teams are not, therefore, the best teams in the world.

If internationals aren’t the pinnacle, do England really need to be technically brilliant to get the international job done? Maybe they need to be better at being functional than any other team is at being technically brilliant. Functional might not try to beat fourteen players, have a 99.3% pass success rate, have 74% of possession or 90% of its shots on target. But functional will stand firm, it will run fast, tackle hard, eat chips and fill its boots with goals. Why don’t England try to win that second tier of competition with a second tier of player? Go for the hoof from the keeper, a flick on from Milner, a chase and cross from Walcott and a bundled finish from Benty.

Do too many of us perceive England’s future to lie with genius football. We have few genius footballers, maybe as a nation we need to perceive our functionality as our strength. We have two very good goalscorers (one happens to be technically brilliant but he is also quite quick and very strong), we have 4 very fast wingers, we have a plethora of workaday midfielders and a host of competent defenders*. Perhaps we should perceive all these players as ‘good enough for England’ we should perceive functional as ‘good footballer’ and we should embrace this. England lives and breathes 1966, breathes it like a wheezing 40-a-day octogenarian, maybe we should stop fannying around trying to catch up with modern football and just reinvent what we used to be good at back then.

Hey presto! World Cup Number Two.

*That bit might actually be where this falls down. And, yes, I am suggesting that Gary Pallister should have been an England regular, he was a stopper, a wall. And Guppy could cross a ball, rather well. We had Shearer and Sheringham for crying out loud, they would have had a field day!

• Calamity James
• conventional wisdom
• Darren Bent
• England
• row Z
• Wayne Rooney