When my good friend, Craig Burrows, coined the term ‘Azkalitis’ several months ago, I immediately knew the term would have caught up with a lot of fans.  It needs no explanation but it also deserves a fair warning for all new fans – this sickness has proven to be quite addictive.

It’s always been said that football is like a drug.  Plenty have already tried to define the sport’s effect to culture, yet every definition is unable to cover the full beauty of the game.  It’s no secret that being a football fan isn’t just about watching the Champions League on Balls Channel or reading the back pages (sometimes the front page) of Inquirer to see the next Azkals story of Cedelf Tupas or waiting for Roy Moore’s blog update for his game analysis.  It’s much more than that.  We all know that the higher state is watching your team play football in the flesh.  For those who have been following the game for years, we all know this little itch in football fandom: if you love ‘em, you have to be there and see them.

Football is about being there. It’s an occasion.  In fact, it’s more than just the 90-minute event.  It’s about the time you leave your house to go to the stadium with the hard-to-find match ticket in your pocket.  It’s about wearing your team’s colors proudly in the train or bus while at the same time hearing whispers ‘Uy, pupunta sa Rizal yan, manunuod ng Azkals’.  It’s about staying outside the stadium for hours to observe the chaos in Adriatico St.  It’s about looking at the floodlights from outside the stadium as you go through the security checks.  It’s about handing your ticket to the usher while keeping the other part of it as a memento.   The noise, the chants, the howls, the drumbeats, the cursing, the smell, the weather, the ‘hands-on-the-head-how-the-hell-did-he-miss-that-sitter?’ moments, the ‘WTF ref!!?’ moments, the ‘Are you f***** blind Mr. Linesman moments’, the celebratory hug with a random stranger moment and even on the final whistle where you show appreciation to both teams for playing the game.  It is an occasion that you truly remember for eternity.

So, the next game comes and you do the same things that you did before.  However, the beauty of the game lies on the fact that it’s a different occasion every single time, all part of a long exciting journey.

The same can be said about our National Team and its fans.  The recent losses to Kuwait as well as the elimination from the World Cup Qualification gave us a lot of hard but valuable lessons.  However, there’s no bigger lesson than what we’ve learned the past three home games from the stands – we are going to be there for this team, regardless of what the final whistle means.

After decades of ignoring the beautiful game and our national team, we’ve finally come to the point where we just have to see them and feel the journey once again, to experience another occasion, to be there, in the flesh, with the team.  We are at the stage where there is a genuine hunger to scream our pride for the rest of the world to hear, not because of how we’ve been performing on the pitch, but because we are part of this great journey of being there, for the team and for the country.  It may be absolutely addictive but it’s what makes us tick, being the clearest and most genuine symptom of Azkalitis.

On our next home game, we will again celebrate every goal, every crunching tackle, every successful save and everything that happens that day.  The final whistle will come but it will signify that only the occasion has ended.
 
The journey continues and like the previous occasions, we will be there in the stands declaring our pride all over again.

It’s all because we just want to see them again, our country, on the pitch, with all our hearts and pride – all for the world to see.