Times 28,007: Footymania

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
In keeping with the present zeitgeist, this crossword has multiple football XI’s in it, one of them even Italian, to celebrate Italy’s recent 3-0 win over Switzerland. (Can I just say I’m borderline offended by somebody called Immobile apparentl;y scoring a goal? I bet he wasn’t.) And then just for good measure it threw in some cricket stuff too, to ensure there was something for every taste.

Some brilliant clues in the mix – I loved the elegant surfaces of “Ray washes trousers and pants” and “Short fat kid visits relations”. Deceptively simple, but amazingly hard to do. 4dn, 8dn and 16dn are brilliantly inventive, and 17dn may be a WOW (word of the week). I don’t know if 8dn, and indeed 9ac, quite work – can anyone add enlightenment to my own attempts to parse them? But even if they don’t you cannot fault this puzzle’s ambition and originality. Well Friday’d, setter, well Friday’d!

1 Urge to fight: one’s content to be beaten eventually? (3-3)
EGG-BOX – EGG [urge] + BOX [to fight]. The content of an egg-box is eggs, which may eventually get beaten

5 Rode with buggy as car started improperly? (3-5)
HOT-WIRED – (RODE WITH*) [“buggy”]

9 Valued systems regularly used in these times (8)
ASSESSED – S{y}S{t}E{m} S{y}S{t}E{m} in A.D. [these times]. Plus an extra SE that, I cannot tell a lie, I don’t know where it comes from.

10 Poorly preserved (4,2)
LAID UP – double def

11 Daring to spoon jam (10)
BOTTLENECK – BOTTLE [daring] + NECK [to spoon]

13 Religious pioneer, one going against the mainstream (4)
EDDY – double def. Mary Baker Eddy is the founder of Christian Science

14 For Caesar, that is, time to depart (4)
IDES – ID ES{t} [Latin for “that is”, minus T(ime)], &lit

15 See that on a broadcast and be amazed (3,4,3)
EAT ONE’S HAT – (SEE THAT ON A*) [“broadcast”]

18 Short fat kid visits relations (5-5)
GREAT-AUNTS – GREAS{e} [“short” fat] “visited” by TAUNT [kid]

20 A physicist, he died after backing human rights (4)
BOHR – OB(iit) reversed + H(uman) R(ights)

21 Coloured stone that’s become white when removed from casing (4)
OPAL – {g}O PAL{e}

23 Bridge repair, one very often short? (10)
CROSSPATCH – CROSS [bridge] + PATCH [repair] – a short-tempered person

25 Eleven of Italy’s fifty islands — rest over to the west (6)
NAPOLI – L I [fifty | islands] to the east/right of NAP O [rest | over]. Italian football team, topically today

26 Give best after admitting one’s disadvantage (8)
HANDICAP – HAND [give] + CAP [best] “admitting” I

28 French department’s English staff returned to hold party (8)
DORDOGNE – ENG ROD reversed, “holding” DO

29 Extra’s stage farewell (3,3)
LEG BYE – LEG [stage] + BYE [farewell]

DOWN
2 Spare, comparatively ancient, fuel tank (9)
GASHOLDER – GASH [spare] + OLDER [comparatively ancient]. I had never come across “gash” as meaning “spare” before, but apparently it’s old naval lingo. Maybe

3 Ray washes trousers and pants (7)
BREATHS – RE [= ray = a drop of golden sun = musical note] “trousered” by BATHS [washes]

4 Letters from abroad: at least twenty two? (3)
XIS – two XIs [elevens] are at least 22.

5 Country fellow’s work in garden including digging at the margins (5)
HODGE – HOE “including” D{iggin}G. An “English rustic or farm labourer”

6 Willing to move: one is keen, let’s get moving! (11)
TELEKINESIS – (I IS KEEN LET’S*)

7 Reserve medicines — spare bottles (7)
ICINESS – “bottled” in {med}ICINES S{pare}

8 Twenty, on leaving Guinea, acquiring horse? (5)
EQUID – {twenty on}E QUID. Isn’t a guinea 21 shillings, not 21 quid? Love the idea though Apparently a “quid” also once referred to a guinea! Live and learn!

12 Striking, say outside, you whip and punch (3-8)
EYE-CATCHING – E.G. [say] “outside” YE, CAT, CHIN

16 What is needed to make its dough (3)
TIN – “is” needed a T IN to make “iTs”

17 Flexible management of redesigned coach yard (9)
ADHOCRACY – (COACH YARD*). Lovely word

19 Singer embracing Liberal lord, everyone embraced by Count! (3,4)
ALL TOLD – ALTO “embracing” L, + LD

20 Fired, perhaps, after lying about being led by bishop (7)
BLAZING – LAZING [lying about] led by B(ishop)

22 Standard way of talking up trouble in gallery (5)
PRADO – reversed R.P. [Received Pronunciation] + ADO [trouble]

24 Yellowish ring sent up by fag (5)
OCHRE – take CHORE [fag] and send the O [ring] upwards to the very top

27 Duck removing foot from river (3)
NIL – NIL{e}

74 comments on “Times 28,007: Footymania”

  1. This was getting to be a drag, so I came here to check the first 4 acrosses. I had EGG-? EGG-BOX not being in my vocabulary (it’s egg-carton). And I had DONE UP, so I was off to a bad start. But LAID gave me TELEKINESIS, which gave me BOTTLENECK, EAT ONE’S HAT, & CROSSPATCH. And so on, other than NAPOLI, which I gave up on. Does EAT ONE’S HAT mean ‘be amazed’? I’ve only seen it in an expression of disbelief, never of amazement (I ate my hat?). Does anyone want to bet on whether we get an explanation from the editor or setter as to ASSESSED?
    1. It could be worse — the Grauniad managed to clue “Boston” the other day with a geographical location of East Anglia (where it isn’t) and a cryptic involving ST being inside a word for “a period of great prosperity” (which a boon isn’t)!
        1. What is UDI? Looked in the acronym list and found, inter alia, “Unidentified Drinking Injury”.
      3. UDI = Unilateral Declaration of Independence. S Rhodesia – Zimbabwe, 1966-ish.
        Andyf
      4. And all that time I thought the UK Boston WAS in East Anglia but I see Lincs. is the East Midlands – of course it is, it has Grantham.
        1. A few miles west of Boston (Lincs) is the hamlet of New York. A bloke named Joe Nickerson bought an acre of land there and advertised a hundred plots of prime NY real estate in the New York Times, with certification. I believe he made a few QUID!
          The Bostonian
      5. When they changed the clue, true to tradition, they spelt the county ‘Lincolnshre’…
  2. My guesses, not quite understoods, and not the first word that comes to minds are a bit different to Jack’s, but the theme is definitely the same. Except that I hung up the old spikes without finishing.
    I definitely wasn’t helped by vaguely knowing that EXI is a proper conjugation of EXEO = to leave, so add the T and quid’s your uncle (use 8d to translate) — I’m surprised that that bear trap didn’t catch our Classicist blogger.
    Thx verlaine, and I think setter

    Edited at 2021-06-18 03:53 am (UTC)

  3. Needless to say, any football theme was completely lost on me.

    I can’t say I enjoyed this much as too many answers went in from definition or guesswork or a combination of both.

    The queries I had remain unresolved, namely a Guinea being 21s and not £21, the unexplained extra SE in ASSESSED and ‘re’ not being ‘ray’ other than in Oscar Hammerstein’s cringeworthy lyric. I guessed OPAL and still don’t really understand it, also NAPOLI.

    At 16dn I deduced TIN from ‘tin loaf’ which requires a tin in its preparation.

    61 minutes and very surprised to find I had all the right answers.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 01:10 am (UTC)

    1. “ ‘re’ not being ‘ray’ other than in Oscar Hammerstein’s cringeworthy lyric”

      and in all the dictionaries …

      1. Ah well, there we are. I don’t recall ever seeing it in 25 years of studying and teaching music but perhaps my memory is at fault. I’ve spent more than twice as long as that solving cryptic crosswords and I don’t remember seeing it there either before today. But at least it gave me an opportunity to say what I think of that stupid song!

        Edited at 2021-06-18 01:00 pm (UTC)

        1. I mean, it’s a sound rather than a word, so I don’t think it matters much how you spell it!
  4. Finished with the squares all green, but took about an hour and a quarter. I think the extra SE in ASSESSED comes from ‘systems regularly used’ meaning that every second letter of ‘system + system’ is used – ? as suggested by plusjeremy above. Otherwise there were about 5-6 which I couldn’t parse, so this was a struggle and I had no hope with the football theme. Still, I loved ADHOCRACY, even if it’s not in Chambers, and HODGE was a good new word.

    Thanks to Verlaine and setter

    1. Ooh! Yes! That’s bloody ingenious! It works.

      I have checked up and a “quid” was once a guinea, so the setter outwitted me (and some others) fair and square — I retract all misgivings!

      1. It still doesn’t work though, does it?

        To be left with EQUID after removing TWENTY ON you have to start with TWENTY ONE QUID which is not a guinea. If quid=guinea it’s 21 guineas.

        What am I missing?

        1. Yes… you’d need quid to mean shilling, wouldn’t you? Which I don’t think it ever did.
          1. Yes, I apologise, it was late and in my excitement to discover that a guinea could be a quid, I failed to notice that it certainly can’t be 21 quid. Even the setter messaged me privately to make a sheepish apology.

            Retraction unretracted!

  5. Like Paul, I enjoyed what I was able to do: namely, everything but BREATHS, EDDY, and EQUID. I did not know, but now do, Why The Eddy Swirls. I had ventured a guess at EQUUS, but couldn’t see any way for that to work. Once I looked up EDDY, EQUID was a reasonable guess. Never would have guessed ‘ray’ = RE (but it’s in Chambers), or the requisite meaning of ‘trousers’. Probably not ‘wash’ = BATH either.

    Naturally, it didn’t help that I kept putting in and taking out ASSESSED (my first in!) because I couldn’t make the wordplay work.

    Since XIS is multiple elevens, perhaps SSES is SSE+SSE?

  6. I had so many question marks I was amazed not to have anything wrong!

    Perhaps the setter meant to us the SE in the middle of uSEd, but omitted the indicator at 9ac?

    Chambers says RE the note CAN be anglicised as ‘ray’. Something new.

    I couldn’t explain EQUID, didn’t know HODGE, and took it on trust that NAPOLI has a football team.

    A little better quality control, and this would have been among the best ever.

    Thanks for the explanations, V.

    1. I wondered that about the SE in used
      , too

      Edited at 2021-06-18 03:54 am (UTC)

  7. Very hard in an excellent way, but I’m with brnchn in saying “A little better quality control, and this would have been among the best ever.” DNF on eddy, which I was never going to get… Didn’t know Eddy, and an eddy goes round and round for me, not against the mainstream per se. That is, half the time it goes with the mainstream, and half the time it goes left or right across the mainstream, and the other half it goes against the mainstream. Bah, humbug. Also failed on equid, through thickness. I actually knew a guinea was more than a pound, but that didn’t matter cos I never got that far, could only think of equus – a film. And I see from previous posters it doesn’t work, as it’s 21 shillings not 21 quid. (I actually thought a pound was 24 shillings – never went to UK before you guys decimalised to 100 newpence.) Breaths was a guess from crossers never parsed; ochre ditto as chore = fag unknown; go pale took forever to parse but I got there; with Kevin on never having heard of an egg box; loved Napoli when I got it – nice to see an Italian place correctly spelled in a Times crossword, first time ever? And guessed the systems regularly were two lots of system regularly, but that doesn’t really work for me.
    Regarding Italian fooballers’ names: I always liked the Australian of Italian descent, Danny Invincible. Last heard of in Scotland, where I first heard the word “gash”, though it meant broken, ruined, not working rather than spare.
    A bit of a curate’s egg; mostly fantastic but a few dodgy bits.
    COD the fat kid, but he had a lot of competition – 5A, 6, 29, 17 for its unexpectedness.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 04:12 am (UTC)

    1. In Australia, until 1966, a Pound was 20 shillings! Just like in the UK. So no need to travel.
      Us guys.

      Edited at 2021-06-18 07:35 am (UTC)

      1. Didn’t have money of my own until about 1969 – given 5c to spend on sweets. Have maybe 2 memories total pre-1966, and neither of them involve pounds shillings and pence.
  8. DNF? There’s a surprise. Brnchn and isla are right that this needed editorial control (unless it is by the editor?). Shame because there were three clues I enjoyed but these were lost in the general self-indulgency.
  9. It seems I enjoyed this more than some others, but it probably helped that I just biffed EQUID and moved on. I assumed it had something to do with quid equating to money but that’s as much thought as I gave it. I finished with difficulty in the Continental corner, with PRADO and NAPOLI. I’d feared the latter was going to be an Italian island group I’d not heard of, but eventually managed the parsing without understanding the definition. “Eleven” for a football team comes up often enough that I should be able to spot it by now — it even appeared in some guise elsewhere today in the form of XIS!
  10. DNF
    Beaten (fairly) by eddy. But didn’t really care whether I finished or not: 8dn is wrong; no two ways about it. For me, one faulty clue negates the rest of the puzzle, no matter how good the other clues are.
    Thanks, v.
  11. Any football theme was completely lost on me and I am a big footie fan! Very rarely these days do only eleven players turn out for a game. We’re now up to 16 at the Euros!

    25ac NAPOLI – home to the ghastly Diego ‘Hand of God!’ Maradona and is not my idea of an Italian football club; unlike Juve (The Old Lady), Milan, Inter and Roma. My LOI.

    FOI 1ac EGG BOX – quaint eh!?

    COD 17dn ADHOCRACY – by a country mile.

    WOD 20ac BOHR an old friend of my grandfather’s and his brother Harald, who played for Lowestoft Town, back in the day.

    This took me just over the hour, but it became something of an IKEAN chore, with the instructions missing at 9ac, 8dn.

    For ages I had 29ac as BYE-BYE as a ‘bye’ can be also be a stage within an event. But the River Nile removed that dubious assertion.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 07:34 am (UTC)

  12. 61 minutes with LOI a biffed TIN. All these years and I finally have a name for my less than structured approach to management, I’d first put ADHOCKERY in. ASSESSED was put in with a shrug but I can see now that it is AD round alternate letters of systemsystem. EQUID was a straight biff from the crossers as a guinea has only ever meant 21 shillings to me. In fact, I had an uncertainty about several answers even with Niels BOHR around to provide the interpretation. I felt uneasy, as if the setter was playing dice. This was a really good Friday challenge though, and it was all guessable. Thank you V and setter.
  13. After 30 mins pre-brekker I had a few gaps. I had ideas for the remainder but no way to explain them sensibly. Pity.
    It is better if the pennies actually drop rather than hover, weightless.
    Thanks setter and V.

    PS. ‘Daring to spoon jam’ was COD for me. Now for some marmalade.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 07:38 am (UTC)

  14. 8dn
    A guinea is TWENTY ONE SHILLINGS. If you take ON from that you get TWENTY E SHILLINGS or QUID E. Don’t like quid and e being the wrong way round but it does parse I think
  15. After 47:46 of mind bending contortions I fell at the flexible hurdle with ADHOCCARY. Drat and double drat. Bl**dy hard going and no coconut. Bah! Don’t see how EQUID works whatever a guinea is defined as. MERed at RE for Ray. Didn’t know HODGE. Didn’t know the pioneer. Thanks V.
  16. ‘A life long morphine addict and hypochondriac, who slipped over on the ice and started a religion.’ R K Siegel. 13ac COD. I gained the impression that the setter threw down the gauntlet to Verlaine & Co. My time just around the quarter.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 08:36 am (UTC)

  17. I suppose I’d better admit to 35.18 and not being able to spell TELEKeNESIS. So there it is.
    Initially I thought I was doing well, three quarters of the way through in 15, but trashed by the SE corner. It didn’t help that I had EYE-WATERING at 12 (s*d the parsing) which scuppered the bridge repair. Once I (somehow) badgered ADHOCRACY into existence and decided BYE-BYE was wrong, the rest fell open.
    Pity about the Guinea foul. Valiant attempts to exonerate aside, I think we can all see how the setter thought it worked, and why it doesn’t. In a perfectly logical way.
  18. Admitted defeat early but enjoyed Verlaine’s parsing. ADHOCRACY is a lovely word, and nice to learn HODGE.
    Not sure about EAT ONES HAT= be amazed, but a fine puzzle nevertheless.

    Thanks to Verlaine and the setter.

  19. 33:33 and amazed I actually got it all right as there were no less than 6 clues I failed to parse. NHO Mary Eddy so thanks for that and the other explanations V. I liked BOTTLENECK and IDES best of those I did understand. I still don’t get EQUID, though. Thanks V and setter.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 08:04 am (UTC)

  20. Happy with football as a theme and I found this quite comfortable for a Friday — there were one or two which I couldn’t quite parse (NAPOLI — but it fit the checkers plus the ‘L’ for 50 so bunged it in; OPAL; OCHRE; EQUID — looked a bit of a mess but saw the general idea) and the NHO EDDY which went in with the daily shrug.
  21. Enjoyed this but agree 8dn is just wrong. I also had BYE BYE for a while (until I got BLAZING) which slowed things up.

    Liked TELEKINESIS and ADHOCRACY is a great word.

  22. 18:48. An unusual and interesting puzzle. Some of it a bit borderline but credit to the setter for creativity.
    There was a fair bit in here I didn’t really understand – the wordplay for ASSESSED, EDDY, GASH, RAY – so I was pleased and slightly surprised not to get a pink square. Fortunately I didn’t think about EQUID for long enough to see the error.

    Edited at 2021-06-18 11:08 am (UTC)

  23. Fabulously challenging crossword – thanks very much setter – but such a shame about Equid as it is just wrong clueing, as others have said. Namely a guinea was never 21 quid, just 21 shillings, and even allowing for the fact that a guinea may once have been a quid, it still doesn’t work. Because I couldn’t parde it, I actually had Equus (which I couldn’t justify either of course!) and the crosser as East, on the basis that East may have been a religious pioneer and pioneers generally went west (Young Man etc)and so going east was against the mainstream! Well, double use of ioneer, but it sort of works. Also I don’t think an eddy ‘goes against the mainstream’ either. However some terrific clues and extremely rewarding to get them.
    1. I’m with you, putting in EQUUS and EAST despairingly at the end of 50 minutes of torture, for the same reasons. The last 15 minutes or so were spent getting these two wrong. We may have been in the mainstream.
  24. …used aids to get a couple of answers.
    Nice to see that even Champions’ League-level solvers like Verlaine a little flummoxed. I don’t understand the SE in ASSES(SE)D. Nor yet do see EQUID.
    Thank you, Velraine and thank you, setter.
  25. Fell into all the traps above, but got there in the end. Didn’t know what a PRADO was and missed the up indicator, so that was my LOI. I was thinking that RP was what Jacob Rees Mogg speaks, but apparently that’s Upper RP.
    WOY ADHOCRACY
  26. ADHOCRACY is a wonderful word that I intend to use as much as possible. I agree with others that this was largely a wonderful puzzle – EGG-BOX was great, ‘Willing to move’ was fantastic – but with a few notable weaknesses, including the mysterious 21 quid and the painful double system.

    8m 40s, which would have been a lot longer if I’d made sure to parse everything.

  27. Far be it from me to challenge Verlaine, but elegance and 2D have nothing in common at all as far as I’m concerned. Re and ray are not homophones where I come from and certainly are not interchangeable. XIS is not a word in any language I know, just a collection of letters. I’ve chucked the towel in on the puzzle and given up with the blog at this point. To those who enjoyed it, good for you. I didn’t get so much as a smile from it.
    1. It’s not supposed to be a homophone, but just alternative spellings (of the note in the tonic sol-fa)as in do ray me; sometimes me is mi, another alternative spelling. Well that’s my takr on it!
    2. Re and ray don’t need to be homophones. We are dictated to by the dictionaries and if they say that re and ray are equivalent, just different spellings in sol-fa notation, then there we are.
  28. Top half went in smoothly (with a shrug for EQUID and ASSESSED) but a complete BOTTLENECK in the southern hemisphere. I knew who Eddy was because there are a couple of her churches taking up immensely valuable real estate on Park avenue on the Upper East Side of NYC – now used as “event spaces”. Did not parse NAPOLI – it was a guess, as was ADHOCRACY after trying to make “autocracy” work even though it’s the opposite of flexible. 27.55
  29. That was fun in an odd sort of way, sometimes not knowing, sometimes disagreeing with setter, but still slowly climbing the mountain to the summit of completion, and enjoying the trip along the way. EQUID: Start with £21 but lose twenty on horse?(5) might have been fairer and more accurate; the “acquiring” in the clue is rather superfluous.[I checked in Chambers too: must have been very confusing when a quid was a guinea too if one cares about the odd bob or two] … Wishing great weekend to one and all; thanks to setter and blogger….
  30. And every news bulletin and newspaper talked for months on end about Ian Smith (the Rhodesian PM) ‘declaring UDI’. The tautology drove me potty.
    1. Very much akin to RAS, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome.

      Though of course in keeping it’s more probably more apt to refer to it as RAS syndrome.

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