Jeremiah White: Possible Revelation for the US?

Jere­miah White was called into US camp this past Jan­u­ary and evi­dently did not make an impres­sion on Bob Bradley. After play­ing a few min­utes against Swe­den he was released from the camp and has not been called back since. White can only hope Bradley is as open in his will­ing­ness to give attack­ing play­ers oppor­tu­ni­ties after early fail­ures as Bruce Arena was. Arena for exam­ple called Jeff Cun­ning­ham, Brian West and Conor Casey repeat­edly into US camps even though it was pretty obvi­ous none of the three had what it took to play inter­na­tional football.

White is play­ing well for Aarhus in Den­mark cur­rently as a striker and we know Bradley must be watch­ing since his per­sonal favorite mid­fielder Benny Feil­haber is also part of the club. (Note I didn’t say Feil­haber plays for the club because he has played once since arriv­ing in Den­mark after the Olympics) White is one Amer­i­can who won’t be intim­i­dated by urine bag toss­ing fans at Saprissa Sta­dium or those throw­ing bot­tles in Guatemala. He’s faced far worse than those things as a footballer.

White orig­i­nally signed out of Wake For­est for a club in Ser­bia, the same nation that con­ducted under Slo­bo­dan Milo­se­vic an eth­nic cleans­ing of minori­ties in the 1990s. White told ESPN.com fol­low­ing about a 2004 inci­dent in Belgrade:

“As I got closer to the group, a few of the guys began to raise their arms, mak­ing Nazi ges­tures towards me. At that point, I prob­a­bly should have walked away, but I asked them what their prob­lem was — I said to them that they prob­a­bly have no clue why they were mak­ing those ges­tures,” White said. “Long story short, one of the guys con­fronted me in an aggres­sive man­ner, and I defended myself.”

After that the group of hooli­gans chased White through the streets and escaped partly due to his leg­endary speed which seemed so tan­ta­liz­ing in the one game we saw him ver­sus Swe­den. The inci­dent made inter­na­tional news includ­ing the Guardian and the BBC.

Bob Bradley has three qual­i­fiers to exper­i­ment with. For all the love Kenny Cooper gets he’s not a pure striker (a sub­ject Chris Webb of United Mania will dis­cuss in the next Major League Soc­cer Talk pod­cast ) and needs to play off some­one. White could be that player that Bob Bradley so badly wants to believe Eddie John­son is: the pacey, wiry attacker that draws fouls and keeps the defense on their heels while cre­at­ing space for the US midfield.

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