on an old, injured flat track bully, big game disappearing act.
With another half a million it’s a big gamble for Spurs on Darren Bent. Is he a top class scorer or is he another Andy Cole – needs half a dozen chances to stick one away.
And what does it mean for the other strikers, is Bent one of the small ones that Jol like to play with a big fella – which has to Berbatov – so where does that leave Keane and Defoe?
Looking at last years stats in scoring his 13 league goals, for a team that wasn’t great and went down, Bent had a 19.7% conversion rate and an accuracy of 43.9% with 66 attempts on goal. So his conversion was better than Berbatov and Defoe but nearly 10% below Keane, with the accuracy again about 10 points lower than Berbatov and Defoe.
The Defoe stats aren’t that surprising, he had quite a lot of shots on target last year without finding the back of the net, managing to hit woodwork and ‘keepers far too much. You just feel that he hasn’t really taken his chances over the last couple of seasons and certainly dropped down the pecking order. You’d have thought that missing out on last years World Cup squad would have given him the kick up the arse, though saying that the effort seemed to be there just the final product.
He’s of course the favourite to be sold, now he’s only about a year older than Bent, got far more Premiership experience, more international caps so shouldn’t he be worth roughly the same amount of cash. But would anyone pay that for him and can we really sell him to a competitor? Or should we not sell and have him on the bench as an impact sub – my preferred choice, he’s a player I like and wanted from West Ham.
So Bent scored about one every two games for a mid table then relegated Charlton can he do better for a fifth placed team and push them up into that top four if he can then the gamble pays off but then the more success the bigger the transfer fee.
Now if the were only stronger in defence to play three up front…