A former England international with 209 goals in professional football might take offence at having to relive the only one he has sliced into the wrong net but not Darren Bent. “I don’t miss from there,” says the self-deprecating Derby County striker of – and there is no diplomatic way of putting it – a comical own goal in the FA Cup against Leicester City. For Bent the fourth-round tie was a source of pride, not embarrassment. It gave reassurance that he still looks comfortable in Premier League company.

Bent turned 33 on Monday but, apart from a meal with his wife and family, there was no time for celebration with a replay looming at the King Power Stadium followed by three home matches in rapid succession that may shape Derby’s play-off prospects. “There’s a bigger job at hand which is to try and get promoted,” says the striker, who gives up time on his birthday for the interview and has a rich individual record to enhance against Claudio Ranieri’s falling champions on Wednesday.

Bent has scored for six different clubs and a total of 17 times in the FA Cup during a career that has taken in Ipswich Town, Charlton Athletic, Tottenham Hotspur, Sunderland, Aston Villa, Fulham, Brighton & Hove Albion and Derby. A deft equaliser quickly atoned for the own goal against Leicester but there was more at stake for Bent that night at the renamed Pride Park.

“Anyone who knows me knows how much the FA Cup means to me and how much I enjoy playing in it,” Bent says. “But what is important at my age, especially when we play top-flight opposition, is thinking: ‘Can I still do it in the Premier League?’ I scored a lot of goals in that league for a number of years and I do think about whether I can still do it if we get promoted from the Championship. We played West Brom and I got the goal and thought: ‘OK, maybe I can.’

“All week in the build-up to Leicester, and apart from my dad I haven’t said this to anyone else, I thought about [Jamie] Vardy being at one end of the pitch and me at the other. After what he did last season I wanted to see how we measured up, how far apart we are, and I thought that went all right if I’m being honest. It was disappointing how we conceded at the end but I was pleased with my performance and proud of the team.

“On a personal level it was nice to see where I was at. I came off the pitch happy I had scored against the Premier League champions and thinking: ‘Yes, maybe you can still do it.’ It has been reassuring to play against two Premier League teams in this Cup run and score in both. I could have had a couple more and, if you count the own goal, it’s three!”

Bent’s team-mates have not missed an opportunity to rib him about this season’s dubious FA Cup hat-trick. “If we had got pummelled 3-0 I don’t think it would have been mentioned again within the dressing room,” he says of the early gift to Leicester. “But because we drew 2-2 and should have won the game, and we have another chance to put it right on Wednesday, we can laugh about it now.

“At the time it was gut-wrenching. These things happen in football although that was the first own goal of my entire career – youth team, any standard of football – and hopefully it will be the last.”

Derby lie three points outside the play-off places in the Championship and have been transformed since Steve McClaren replaced Nigel Pearson as manager in October. The Rams took 10 points from their first 11 matches of the season and were languishing in 20th place when the former England manager returned to the club for the fourth time, somewhat apologetically given his acrimonious departure 17 months earlier.

“I guess sometimes things just fit and other times they don’t,” is Bent’s diplomatic take on the change. “A lot of the boys were relieved to see the manager back. It might have been different with the fans after he left. Everyone has their own perspective but as players we were delighted to have him back. Because he hadn’t been gone that long and had us playing in a certain way before he left we were half-stuck between how he had wanted us to play and how Nigel Pearson wanted us to play by the time he returned.

“The way Nigel Pearson wanted us to play wasn’t working too well, as good as a manager as he is, and we knew the way Steve McClaren wanted to play does work. If we finish in the top six it is going to be an unbelievable achievement. It is a tough league, tougher than previous seasons. We have that to look forward to as well as the FA Cup. It’s a good time to be a Derby County player.”

Not so a Leicester City player following their own, unwanted transformation from globally acclaimed Premier League champions to relegation contenders in nine months. Bent insists he was hugely impressed by how “fast they moved the ball, how fast they were on the counterattack and their set pieces. I don’t think we have played a team before where the delivery was on the money every single time.” Having watched Leicester’s 3-0 home defeat by Manchester United on Sunday, however, he detected parallels with his own relegation experiences at Ipswich and Charlton.

The striker says: “The closest I’ve experienced to that was at Ipswich Town where one season we finished fifth in the Premier League and qualified for Europe, then got relegated the following season. That was like: ‘Woah! What was that?’ The only thing I can think of is that Leicester must have believed that to do it again it was going to be not impossible but very hard. It was always going to be difficult but I didn’t expect them to be where they are now.

Bent celebrates after scoring for Derby in the first game against Leicester. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

“It would be such a shame if it happened and a horrible way for the Leicester story to end. Ranieri is a world-class manager and hopefully he’s got something up his sleeve to turn it around, but what that is I don’t know. From watching their game against United it looks very difficult.

“You know when you are sinking. I was relegated at Charlton. At one point we got out of the relegation zone but we then lost two on the spin and I think we just knew then. We just couldn’t get a result and you reach a point where draws are not good enough.

“We were going into games more open and teams were picking us off. We were not good enough to keep clean sheets and were not scoring enough goals to stay up. You still give 100% but there comes a point where, deep down, you know it’s not going to be enough to get out of it.”

Reassured by his continued productivity against Premier League defences, Bent is looking only upwards. The striker launched an academy for six- to 14-year-olds in Birmingham last week but is not contemplating life outside the professional game yet.

Next season will be his third as a Derby player and, he fervently hopes, a first with the club in the Premier League.

“It burns to get back there,” he says. “I’ve had a taste of it three times this season against Liverpool, West Brom and Leicester, and it is a league I want to be back in. I’ve always said to young people who ask me about playing in the Premier League that, whatever your ambitions in life, you have to aim to play on the highest stage against the best teams. If it’s money or the best cars you’re after, you have to be playing at the very top first, and that’s the Premier League. My ambition was always to be one of the top goalscorers in the Premier League. Money never really crossed my mind but, if you’re doing well, that comes with it. The motivation has to be to play at the highest level. Football has to come first. The rest will look after itself.”