Why Tevez & Bent are real deal in EPL

[skyvia]

Andrew Atherley explains why Carlos Tevez and Darren Bent are awesome long-term bets to find the back of the net in the EPL.

This Sunday, two of the EPL's most potent scorers will battle it out when Manchester City head to Sunderland and, in all likelihood, Darren Bent and Carlos Tevez will have a massive say on proceedings. It is extremely probable that both forwards will find the back of the net when you take into account their scoring rates.

In 50% of his EPL appearances since the start of the 2009/2010 domestic campaign, Bent has grabbed a goal, with Tevez's rate standing at 41% and rapidly improving. The long-term nature of those statistics makes both strikers great value bets in the goalscoring markets whenever they start a game and, rather than trying to be selective, soccer bettors who back them every time are putting themselves on a fast track to profit. Don't be afraid to back both to score in each EPL game from now until the end of the season.

Impressively, last season, Bent's 24 goals in the league came in 18 matches, which was on a par with Wayne Rooney and second only to Didier Drogba. Bent was also the clear leader in another important area, scoring first on 13 occasions, a stat that put him two ahead of Rooney. He also managed an even split against sides from the top and bottom half of the EPL, both in terms of goals scored and the proportions of games in which the goals were notched up.

His importance to his team simply cannot be underestimated. Last season, Sunderland averaged 1.94 points per game when Bent got himself on the score sheet but that figure fell to 0.45 when he didn't.

Meanwhile, since Roberto Mancini took over at City, Tevez has built up a Bent-like record for the team. Under old boss Mark Hughes, Tevez scored in just four of his 16 appearances in the EPL. For Mancini, though, he has scored in 10 out of 19 appearances. It is easy to argue based upon those stats that Hughes failed to get the best out of Tevez but the striker's goalscoring record under him improved as time wore on, so you could also argue that the manager was sacked far too early.

Moving on, we've spoken before about the importance of Newcastle and West Brom winning sooner rather than later and, at the second opportunity, they did just that, meaning that all three promoted teams have managed to pick up three points within their opening two fixtures of the season.

That fact hands their survival chances a big boost and laying West Brom for relegation this season at 2.28 (+128) still looks like a good play. Newcastle have now edged out to 7.2 (+620) seventh favorites for relegation and that looks about right to me, with several teams looking far more realistic candidates for the drop.