This afternoon, Sunderland’s Darren Bent will debut a very special pair of Umbro Specialis in the game against West Ham. As you can see from the pictures featured here, Darren’s Specialis feature the logo from social networking site Twitter, plus the name @DBTheTruth, the name that the striker goes by online.

Here at Umbro we designed the boots for Darren after we realised what a massive fan he was of Twitter – he posts on the site a few times every day, and often takes pictures of things that catch his attention and uploads these as well. At the shoot for the pictures featured here, Darren snapped three different designs that we’d taken along for another pair of boots we’re designing for him, and asked his Twitter followers to pick out the one they liked best. He’ll wear the dynamite boots in another upcoming match.

Darren is the highest profile Premiership player to regularly use Twitter, something which famously got him into trouble earlier this year when comments he posted over his protracted move to Sunderland became public. He’s not the only footballer to Tweet though – two weeks ago, Darren was joined by Aston Villa goalscorer James Collins in celebrating scoring the winner through his Twitter posts. If you want to discover which other footballers are Twittering on a regular basis, we’ve collected the best ones that we can find here.

Just like anyone in the office will tell you, it’s great to see our players doing well and coming through the ranks in the international setup. So it was good to see this shot of Michael Mancienne alongside John Terry, Darren Bent and Curtis Davies in the paper this morning. 

Michael has worn umbro boots for 2 years now and is currently wearing the SX Flare boot.

Best of luck for tonight lads!!