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.

Plenty of people have already been checking out the Football Hero video, so we thought we’d update with a little bit of information about the story behind it…

After the massive success of their West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum album, Kasabian and their record label Sony decided to do something a little different to celebrate the release of their new single Underdog.

This video tells the story of Football Hero, an experiment to create a giant guitar game with a twist – it’s controlled by footballs. Standing three stories high, the game was built by a group of talented engineers and controlled by a team of gifted freestyle footballers (Paul Wood, Paul Klein, Darryl Stewart, Tom Pett, Lewis Foster and Harry Adcroft) who had to ping footballs accurately at the pressure sensors in time with the Kasabian track. After plenty of practice and a few failed efforts, the team nailed it on the seventeenth attempt, gaining a five star rating from the unforgiving game.

In the lead up, Sony had noticed some of the interesting things we’ve been doing at Umbro with our sportswear range and asked us to kit out the footballers for the occasion. So you’ll notice the team are sporting our beautifully tailored new Football Wardrobe range. Football Wardrobe will be available in all good retailers from November.

Everton star Phil Jagielka dropped into Umbro House yesterday to chat with our team, so we grabbed the chance to sit him down for ten minutes and ask a bunch of questions that people had asked via Facebook and Twitter. A defender, sometime midfielder and even a goalkeeper on occasion, Phil is certainly the versatile type, which proved to be pretty useful when it came to answering your enquiries…

tookiebunten on Twitter wanted to know: When do you hope to back from injury?

‘I’m feeling quite positive at the moment; obviously it’s been six months now, and I’ve been told that’s the minimum time it’ll take to heal. So I’m hoping to start training again in the next month, and go from there.’

Jack Oliver Reynolds on Facebook asked: What have you been doing with all your spare time?

‘Watching most of the box sets! I’ve watched The Inbetweeners, Entourage, The Wire, loads of stuff. I started to play a bit of golf but my knee didn’t really like that so I had to stop unfortunately. So I’ve really just been lazing around and doing as little as possible. I’ve been itching to get back into training properly, give the lads the opportunity to give me a bit of stick, as I’ll obviously be a rusty when I get back in. You do miss the banter – I went to Benfica the other day and it was nice to be around the lads at training and all that. You miss that when you’re stuck one-on-one with the physio for three months. He’s a nice bloke, but there’s only so many jokes he can tell!’

We here at Umbro got one question in, and asked: What do you think of Everton’s start to the season?

‘It’s been a bit up and down, we don’t normally start the season very well for some reason, and this year was no different. We don’t have the biggest squad, and obviously losing Jolean didn’t help, but hopefully now we’ve got all the people in we can go from strength to strength. Get a few clean sheets and go from there really.’

Elyshia89 wanted to know: Which other clubs would you like to play for?

‘I’m not sure about other clubs. I was a boyhood Man Utd fan, but not sure whether I’d want to play there – there’s a lot of pressure and they play a squad game, so you might play one game and then not play again for a few weeks. I like the situation at Everton; hopefully when I get back to full fitness I can play more or less every game, which is something I’ve always enjoyed.

Jorge Pablo Bonilla Arza asked: Would you ever consider going back to Sheffield United?

‘As far as Sheff U is concerned, I’d never say never. I had a great time there, it was brilliant, and you never know what’s round the corner.’

Harry Norton on Facebook wanted to know: Do you think you could get into Fabio Capello’s World Cup squad?

‘Yeah, I’d love to. I’ve been asked that question a couple of times, but obviously at the moment I’m just concentrating on getting fit and playing for Everton. The little light at the end of the tunnel at the moment would be playing for Everton, and the big light would be being named in the World Cup squad, but so much can happen between now and then.’

Kev_SAFC on Twitter asked: Who’s the toughest player you’ve played against?

‘That’s a tough one, because you get to play against so many top players. I’ve always said that the player I dislike playing against the most is Emile Heskey. You might be surprised because he doesn’t score that many, but once you’ve played against him you know you’ve been in a game. As for someone you’d be scared of scoring if you made a mistake, you can’t look beyond Torres or Rooney.’

Dan213 on Twitter had done some research and wanted to know: What’s the story behind your unusual middle name?

‘It’s Nikodem. Just before I was born my Polish granddad died, and that’s his name, it’s Nicholas in Polish. I got a bit of stick for it when I was younger, but I’m proud of punch about it now. Someone once asked me if I’d ever play for Poland, but it’s not for me. I consider myself English, I was born here, played here, and I don’t speak any Polish, so it’d be quite hard to understand the other players!’

Dylan Keenan asked: What’s the worst kit you’ve had to wear?

‘For feel and look, it’d be the Sheffield United kit just after I made my debut (1999-2000). It was a Patrick kit, and the shorts were like hot pants. The socks were so mis-shaped it was untrue. I’ve not got the smallest legs, so you can imagine how bad it looked on me.’

Dylan also wanted to know: What ambitions in football do you still have?’

‘Going back to the England question, it’d be nice to play in a World Cup. I missed out on playing in an FA Cup final last year, and I must have played in  4 or 5 semi finals now, and only won one. So it’d be nice to play in a final, and if I could sneak into the World Cup squad that’d be brilliant.’

And finally, Howieboss on Twitter came up with another strange question after the one he asked Michael Owen: When lightning strikes the ocean, how come all the fish don’t die?

‘Hmmm…I can’t think of an answer, tell him I liked his question though. Actually, they were all wearing rubber gloves, that’s why they couldn’t get electrocuted, how’s that?
I’ve got a question for this guy actually: in The Shawshank Redemption, when the guy escapes, how does he crawl through the tunnel and put the poster back on the wall in his cell so well? Let’s see what he comes up with to answer that!’

Mind On Fire: Lowell, Joe and Ben

Same Teens: Jade, Ryan and Hannah

Yesterday, the first winners of the Umbro Industries bursary were announced: congratulations to Mind On Fire and Same Teens who both walked away with £5,000 of investment after the panel of judges decided they were both equally deserving of the prize. You can read more about the Autumn instalment of Umbro Industries at the site here, and we’ll have interviews with the winners, photos and videos of the event all appearing this week. Over at our Flickr stream, we’ve already got a selection of pictures from the event yesterday, featuring all the five finalists.

Entrants for the Winter Umbro Industries competition can upload their ideas to the site from next Monday, November 2, for the chance to win all or part of the next £10,000 prize.

Five-a-side is now bigger, in men’s participation numbers at least, than traditional 11-a-side football in the UK.

We know this to be true. We can’t show you in-depth statistical data or seven-year studies to prove this, no-one can. You can take my word for it though, it’s true nonetheless.

We know it’s true because five-a-side fits perfectly with our modern lifestyle. It’s quick, exciting, snack-size football, served up on a week night somewhere in between seeing your Gran and going sofa shopping! (Maybe that’s just me!)

It gives you that awesome football fix when and how you need it and more than 500,000 of us, along with our mates, turn out every week to get our latest installment. 

We’re just the same here at Umbro. We love five-a-side for exactly the same reasons as you and three years ago we realised that the only thing five-a-side lacked was the ultimate dream! Something big. Something we could all aspire to and could take us from a dodgy astroturf in the wilderness all the way to Wembley’s pristine pitch.

We wanted to know who were the best fives teams and then play against them. And so, with a little help from our friends, we made it happen and The FA UMBRO Fives was born.

Since then, more than 4,000 teams have taken part in the ultimate five-a-side challenge and, of which, around a hundred of the best have lived out their dream under that massive arch.

We think we’ve done something pretty special for five-a-side football and made what was already pretty much 99% perfect just that little bit better.

We’ve started recruiting for the 2009 UMBRO Fives so visit www.thefa.com/umbrofives to find your local heats (they’re happening pretty much everywhere in England) and make your own stories for the grandkids!

This is a new series of films celebrating a part of the beautiful game that we really love…the tackle!  These ads are being shown as TV commercials in various different countries. You can see these and more on our You Tube profile.   We hope you enjoy them and would love to see some examples of your favourite football tackles.