With Darren Bent looking like a racing certainty at this stage, I figured it was safe to take a look at his career stats in the same format as Jean Makoun recently.

Bent has been successful throughout his career with a couple of notable exceptions; his eyebrow raising £16.5m move to Tottenham won’t be remembered all that fondly and for some reason it just hasn’t clicked for him at senior level for England.

That said, after the season he put together last year (something we’ll look at in more detail after the headlines numbers that follow), why he didn’t get a seat on the plane to South Africa only Fabio Capello knows. Not that he could have made much of a difference to that shower.

Anyway, here is his career to date in numbers:

2009/10 Premier League Stats

As it happens, I have a stack of data I collected from the 2009/10 season for an unfinished project and I decided to check out the strike potency of all the players last year. Based on minutes played, and filtering out players who played less than 1,000 minutes last season, Darren Bent ranked 6th:-

1. Fernando Torres 0.95
2. Didier Drogba 0.94
3. Wayne Rooney 0.86
4. Carlos Tevez 0.72
5. Robin Van Persie 0.65
6. Darren Bent 0.64
7. Jermain Defoe 0.63
8. Cesc Fábregas 0.62
9. Frank Lampard 0.61
10. Ivan Klasnic 0.60

If you’re interested, Carew ranked 22nd in my list, Gabby was 26th and Emile Heskey came in at 63 with the same goals per game ratio as Damien Duff, Danny Murphy, Tomas Rosicky and Shaun Wright-Phillips.

I also happened to have similar data for our three main strikers; Gabby, Carew and Heskey over the last four years in comparison with Peter Crouch, Jermaine Defoe and Robbie Keane. I forget why.

Anyway, here’s how Darren Bent compared with those six strikers in the 2009/10 Premier League season:-

As you can see, extremely comparable with Jermaine Defoe. If he can hook up those sort of numbers at Villa, we’ll be golden in no time.

However, it must be noted that Bent has scored eight goals from 1,744 minutes so far this season, which equates to 0.413 goals per game, his poorest since the 0.409 rate returned him 13 goals in 2006/07:

• 2006/07 – 0.409
• 2007/08 – 0.470
• 2008/09 – 0.497
• 2009/10 – 0.638

But then there’s a lot of football to be played yet!

Hopefully the publicity and transfer fee don’t contribute to a Tottenham style season, but even so, given Gabby’s strike rate over the last four seasons of 0.244, 0.302, 0.317 and 0.380, it wouldn’t work out too badly for us.

Here’s to seeing Darren run out in claret and blue as soon as possible, we need goals from somewhere!

[The data used here has been sourced from the official Premier League website, ESPN Soccernet and Soccerway]