There is this incredible physical feat I can pull off only when I’m playing pool, the green tabletop game beloved of steaming drunk men and students, something I have variously been at certain points in my lifetime, and it is this: with the cue resting in the cleft between my folded thumb and forefinger, and my middle finger steadying the entire hand on the baize, I can flick and raise my ring finger to insane heights and angles while the rest of my hand remains still. It’s more of a physical tic than something I can control – there is this impulsive need in my ring finger to jolt until it finds a comfortable angle and settles, like that ache in your thumb you have developed recently when you wake up and need to check and scroll your phone – and the ring-finger flicking routine is an integral part of my pool-shooting game: I am a reasonably good pool player, not a ringer exactly but a good obtuse angle potter, and the jolting ring finger is a large part of that.

There are other sacred routines, too: normally I am playing pool in an extremely shitty northern pub, when I play it, where the baize has been stained in places by two or three separate glasses of wine or pints of Snakebite (normal pints of lager do not stain pool tables as bad, but do get spilled on them with much more frequency), and that means the communal cues are often quite shitty and warped somehow and the whole table has a lean to it like a badly kept bowling alley, and the tip of the cue is mashed and compacted in myriad different places, and so to find the exact specific good striking part of the cue I will, while in shooting position, twizzle and rotate the cue, until I find something I am marginally happy with but has no scientific or logical reasoning to how it is a better part of the cue to hit the ball with.

OR: there is a small internal gyroscope that must be quietly abated by putting weight evenly on one or both of my feet, and until I find that exact mercurial centre – a moment or two, tilting forward and back – I cannot pot with accuracy. Friends who have been privy to these three concurrent routines while playing me at pool have often been known to remark ‘fucking hell’ or, more exasperated now, ‘fucking hell’ in the ten to fifteen seconds it takes me every time I pot. But the point is: I pot, buddy. I pot and pot again. I pot and my whole body feels it, every singing atom of who I am.

Have you ever seen Cristiano Ronaldo take a free kick? It’s a glorious thing, and close to watching someone praying: he steps backwards three large steps from the ball, then one step to either the right or left, and then stands there, feet splayed wide apart, arms out rigid by his side, chest up and out like a retired army general marching downstairs for breakfast; then he breathes, three deep breathes in through the nose and out dramatically through the mouth; then he settles, for a moment, waits for the whistle, his ablutions complete; and then he runs on the spot two or three times before actually putting his glorious body in motion, and then pelts the ball fantastically hard, and Cristiano Ronaldo 1, Opposition Team 0.

OR: have you ever swung a golf club, really really swung it? It is all about routines and sub-routines that only you can identify, a war of attrition between the logical clinical mechanic of the swing and the small feelings inside yourself when the weight is on your feet just right. Pulse each foot until they are in the right position. Wiggle yourself onto the exact balance you want. Look up, look down, look up again, then head down: and beat, and beat, inhale and swing. It has to feel right or it won’t go. You cannot swing a golf club without feeling.

OR: have you ever seen a dog piss? Dogs piss like I play pool, or Cristiano Ronaldo hits a free kick, or you swing a golf club: they sniff the ground, dogs, tamp it with their paws, find the exact blades of grass they wish to anoint with their holy piss, then turn around in tight circles two, three times, then squat and let go. Or shit, they shit in a similar way too. And what I am saying is this: sport is very primal, based on feeling and motion we cannot sense or see. In that way, it renders us like dogs, intricately pissing. We are no closer to animals than when we are swinging a golf club. We are little more than beasts when we hit a tennis serve just right. Thank you and amen.