Keep practising

I would like to be a proper football fan, but I’ve never really got the hang of it. My partner asked me today, as we watched some of the World Cup, what the offside rule is. I have a rather vague idea about this – I know it is to do with where people are on the pitch – but that’s about it, and I confessed my ignorance. I never ‘learned football’ properly, but have managed for years to ‘get by’ with a little knowledge and a lot of luck. But even if I had had the rules of the game drilled into me at school it would have done little good for understanding today’s game: rules change and conventions shift with time. That means you need to keep up your ‘game’. To be able to talk football you need to spend at least some portion of your time practising your lines, and practising your delivery of those lines.
There is some irony in this: it is so ‘un-English’ to practice. Flanders and Swann’s ‘A Song of Patriotic Prejudice’, about why the English are superior to all other nations, summed this up nicely:
“And all the world over, each nation's the same.
They've simply no notion of playing the game.
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!”

Lichtenberg loved England, living there in 1770 and again from 1774 to 1775 but had a sharp eye for the local scene:
“If countries were named after words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.” Notebook F: 1776 – 1779