Justin Bijlow has played on the radar at Ajax in the past, his brother Joël and father Willem tell in an extensive interview with Football International. Bijlow has been a passionate fan of Feyenoord since childhood, sat in the stands in De Kuip as a young boy and made it to the first team with the Rotterdammers, where he is currently the first goalkeeper again after a long injury. Ajax’s interest was therefore immediately sent to the trash can by his loved ones.
The van Bijlow family was approached in the past after a match between Feyenoord and Ajax by Peter den Otter, then trainer of brother Joël. “Peter worked at Ajax at the time. He had Edwin van der Sar and Sjaak Swart with him”, Joël remembers. “They said: Joël, your brother is not normally that good. We can use him here.” I looked at him and asked: What do you think? That he will play for that club of yours? Van der Sar looked away and Swart then wondered aloud what was going on. All I could say was, “He’s not going to walk around with that logo of yours on his chest, is he?”
The aversion towards Amsterdam and Ajax runs deep with the Bijlow family. Joël, nine years his senior, also went through the Feyenoord youth academy, but never managed to make it into an official match. He did, however, train several times with the main force under former trainer Gertjan Verbeek. “I have always said that I would rather create pits than play football in Amsterdam. That is just part of us and it will not disappear”, Joël continues. His father, who runs his own contracting company, doesn’t like Ajax either. “A subcontractor should really not come to us with an Ajax shirt. Then he can pack immediately.”
With the football weekly, the pair look back extensively on the youth that Bijlow enjoyed and the barriers he had to overcome in the past to get to where he is now. The goalkeeper made his debut under the bar at Feyenoord in 2017 at the age of nineteen and is now in the shirt of the Rotterdam club in 36 league games. “He actually grew up too early”, says his father Willem. “That boy was so eager and so good that the trainers dared it with him. But it went very quickly. Of course he is still a boy somehow.”
This season, Bijlow had to watch from the stands for a long time due to a lingering injury. It came to a lot of criticism, including that he was too prone to injury. “He doesn’t care what they write about him,” says his father. “One day he’s a hero, the next a dick. But I did warn him about those injuries. I said,” What happened to your brother could happen to you. You have to be really careful. ” He might have prevented that toe injury. That has to do with maturity. He wants every ball, even in a warm-up. He always takes risks. He just has to get smarter at that. “