Times 25144 – Sporting Highlights

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 23 minutes

After the usual 5 minutes thinking I’m not going to be able to even make a start on this one, I found it remarkably easy. I’ve not much time today so let’s just get on with it…

Across
1 A GRANT L in FLY = FLAGRANTLY. Carriages!
6 IT’S A reversed = ASTI. I didn’t realize it was a place.
10 UN + C for clubs + OVER = UNCOVER
11 ST in A POLE = APOSTLE
12 R in THE + S for small + HOLD = THRESHOLD, Why do I always want to spell that with 2 H’s?
13 KENDO = END in a knockout
14 BEARD = BEAR + Debate, what one does to lions
15 SPRINGBOK = SPRING + B + OK. Antelope obligato. Having discovered during the week there was such a thing as an Antilope, I’ll never feel quite the same way about them.
17 CONCEIVED – ONCE + I’VE in a CD
20 CUSHY = CU + SHY, as in coconut
21 WELLS, double definition, the first facetious
23 NEWSPRINT = NEW SPRINT
25 TIN + FOIL = TINFOIL
26 IN TERM outside I = INTERIM
27 Deliberately omitted. If you have any objections why don’t you give me one?
28 HANG-GLIDER, a cryptic definition, I think
Down
1 FAUST = FAST spread around U
2 ASCERTAIN = CRATE* in A SIN
3 REVISED VERSION = REVISED* = DIVERSE, for my COD
4 N and S containing ARROWS = NARROWS
5 E plonked in LANDER with an umlaut = LEANDER, excelling in marathon swimming and other sporting endeavours
7 SIT-IN, a how would you describe it?
8 ICE-HOCKEY = CHOICE* + KEY as in Largo. A lot of sport today.
9 ROW reversed + KING + CAPITAL, what ho? = WORKING CAPITAL
14 (WRECK A BOAT – O)* = BACKWATER. I like “none the less”
16 I R inside BEST RED = BESTIRRED, as Leander must have been
18 AN in VILLA = VANILLA, my favourite milkshake
19 DOWNING, double definition, the second a street
22  NINE being 32 + L for line, all reversed = LENIN
24 Deliberately omitted. It’s not in my revised remit.

45 comments on “Times 25144 – Sporting Highlights”

  1. Easiest offering for some time but I still managed to butcher it. I had BOARD at 14ac which seems to work for me.
    1. The “boldly confront” bit would seem to be your problem with that.. not convincing, but I see the question is discussed in more depth below

      Edited at 2012-04-23 02:24 pm (UTC)

  2. My effort was an amalgalmation of the experiences of the three to report so far…plus that most embarrassing of all errors, getting the omitted clue wrong.

    My first in was the last clue I looked at (24dn), having tentatively pencilled in ‘lending library’ at 3dn. I must have spent at least five minutes considering various words that might mean either ‘decisive victory’ (‘Alamo’, anyone?) or ‘Asian’ (‘Kazoo’ – at least, by now I’d cottoned on to the knockout) before I saw the obvious. I also spent a long time trying to move the ‘e’ about in LEANDER when I already had the answer. I was hitting the woodwork like Liverpool Football Club.

    My two wrong were ‘board’ (boldly confront an oil tanker off the Eritrean coast?) and, um, ‘rink’. Well, I thought an ice-rink is kind of round, and that strip of grass bowlers roll their woods down is sort of square.

    It’s a moot point how long it will be before SPRINGBOK will neeed to be clued as ‘former sportsman’.

    1. According to OED “board also means: To “approach, ‘make up to’, accost, address, ‘assail’; to make advances to”
      1. Chambers and the Shorter Oxford also have this definition of board, but only the Shorter Oxford has anything like an ill-mannered person for boar: “a.The male of the swine, whether wild or tame (but uncastrated) d. fig. applied to persons ME.” It does have boarish as “cruel (Formerly often confused with boorish.)”. At some point then, the boar, boor, bore confusion must have been sorted out, but I was obviously off school that day. Both Collins and the ODE prefer boor for the ill-mannered fellow.
  3. 14:10, a personal best, I think, or close. Or it would have been if I had come up with BEARD instead of ‘board’, which I’m glad to see worked for others as well as me. When I saw my score I was sure I’d fouled up on 9d, since I had thrown that in without parsing the clue; and a lovely clue it was.And now I notice that I never figured out LEANDER, either; just threw it in on the basis of the definition, thinking, ‘That was easy.’
  4. 29 minutes. I had a similar problem as the blogger getting started on this one but eventually I found a foothold in the NE and things improved rapidly after that.

    I also had REVISED EDITION for a while at 3dn but finding myself facing W?L?T at 21ac I didn’t take long to realise something was badly amiss.

    I was surprised to find on looking it up that a boxing RING is actually a true square rather than simply rectangular. I’ve never even been near one in my life and I guess it must be an optical illusion on TV that makes them look wider than they are deep.

    Edited at 2012-04-23 05:39 am (UTC)

    1. It’s got to be circular as otherwise the ladies who walk round in circles bearing the Round number aloft would get confused.
  5. 12 minutes steady solve, with last in BEARD – it was going to be BOARD until I remembered just in time that on this planet (grid reference 25106) the ill-mannered animal is the bear – a little over a month ago and causing the same problems then.
    Don’t think I knew FLY=carriage, but genuinely believe most words mean carriage somewhere, probably in Regency fiction.
    CoD to the RV – I like that kind of clue.
  6. Hammering with rain again here today. Since the completely inept people who run our water utilities declared a drought its barely stopped and golf has become a backwater

    Very easy puzzle – 15 minutes stroll. Even had time to wonder if Lenin was more Marxist than Communist!

  7. Another ‘board’ here, I’m afraid. And I too had ‘revised edition’ for a while at 3dn. Other than that, all ok, if somewhat slow.

    COD: BACKWATER.

  8. 16 minutes, but another BOARD here, having forgotten the bear/boar controversy of a few weeks ago.
    My last in was 27ac, and I was very unsure of it. The answer is RING, right? Is this a specific reference to boxing? It seems a bit odd to describe two people beating seven shades out of each other as “performing”. Perhaps it’s a reference to wrestling. Or perhaps there’s something else I’m missing entirely.
    2. I figured the round version might be the circus ring – more performers there, I think.
      1. Indeed, I didn’t have a problem with the round bit. Just the square bit. I assume it’s a reference to a boxing ring but I still struggle with boxers “performing”.
        1. It must be World Championship Wrestling then. When Killer Kowalski belly flopped onto his opponent from the top rope, we knew they were just acting, they knew we knew thay were just acting, and we knew …
          1. Perhaps it has to be to make the thing work. I wonder if that’s what the setter had in mind.
            The “wrestlers” I remember are Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. The former was called Shirley, which seemed somehow significant at the time. Funny what you remember.
  9. Straightforward, but nonetheless enjoyable, with lots of smooth, succinct clues. Don’t have a time because of three interruptions from the telephone and one from the doorbell.

    This device of “square” as a number is getting quite a lot of use; I’ve noticed it in The Guardian and The Independent, and there might be a danger of it becoming formulaic, so it was good to see the squaring of the circle in 27. I think one setter used “8 million“ as a cube the other day, but I can’t remember where I saw it.

    The song that always comes to my mind when I see BACKWATER is one from Bessie Smith.

    And I shall never forget my old Chemistry master’s joke (his only one, he was not known for his humour) when asked if mercury was naturally occurring metal: “Yes, have you never heard of H.G. WELLS?”.

    Edited at 2012-04-23 10:33 am (UTC)

    1. The old ones are the best John

      To help the more arts leaning members of our august fraternity, Hg is the chemical symbol for Mercury.

  10. 14 minutes, with lots of the delay being self-inflicted by being another who went with REVISED EDITION. Given the clue, of course, there’s no way of knowing that’s wrong until you get the checkers (though if you start with the wrong one, those checkers are considerably harder to get in the first place…) Anyway, nice Monday-ish sort of puzzle.
    1. I took “book collection” to mean the bible, so it had to be Revised Version, or is there a Revised Edition as well?
      1. Good point. I read “collection” as referring to the collection of letters which could be jumbled to make DIVERSE or REVISED, so was just looking for any old book which has had more than one printing. I’m sure the Bible is the intended meaning, but as has been demonstrated many times in these pages, if there is more than one way to parse a clue, you can be sure someone here will find it.
  11. But in the BOARD club, unfortunately. Made steady progress throughout. Decent crossword with some good clues, but nothing too taxing. Capital Monday fare.
  12. about 20 minutes for me, held up by the backwater/ring combo. Anyone else remember 5d from having to study Don Juan by Byron for A-Level – hope it isn’t just me that is that old!!
  13. Happily entered ‘beard’, took a while to associate ‘fly’ with carriage, but was stumped for a frustratingly long time over wells. Oh well, another day, another…

    Enigma

  14. 12:40 .. definitely on the right wavelength from the start, BEARD and REVISED VERSION going almost straight in.

    Nice easier puzzle.

    COD .. HANG-GLIDER – nice to see a sphinxian riddle once in a while.

  15. I zoomed through the right hand side but then ground to a halt. Eventually I got BACKWATER and the rest just fell into place – apart from RING which was my last one in and which I don’t like very much. An enjoyable 23 minutes.
  16. Bit of a struggle at 44.39 and another board here owing to lazily thinking it was a rarer version of boor. COD for me to 28a but a number of pleasing ones today. I wondered if SPRINGBOK was only used for sportsman.
  17. I wasn’t in tune with this puzzle, maybe I’m having a dim day but I gave up in frustration after 20 minutes with only a few clues solved. Now that I state it it sounds more like impatience but I felt like I lost momentum.
    1. Put the puzzle aside and do something else for half an hour. When you come back to it you may well find things different – you’ll find most of us do that from time to time
  18. I had a day off work today and it was a nice change to solve the puzzle in the paper paper – inside back page opposite Sebastian Vettel and a write up of the Bahrain GP. I usually print off the puzzle from the website.

    Slow to get going but got there in the end. LOI Beard. I read The Time Machine a couple of weeks ago so Wells came to mind quickly from W?L??.

  19. I raced through in under 15 minutes, but on the way I entered BOARD without questioning it, and thus I came a cropper. Oops. But I liked the puzzle, which had a lot of very nice surfaces. COD to the REVISED VERSION. Thanks, setter. Regards.
  20. Mooched along in 27. In 19 presumably we ignore the 10 in the address and seize on Downing as ‘first’? Have the feeling I’m missing something here. Not quite on the wavelength but tackling after work isn’t conducive to fast times, and the grunt of enjoyment at the daily trough is after all the purpose of existence, with gnashing speed secondary. Nevertheless…
    1. All the buildings in Downing Street are government offices so I guess ‘political address’ covers the whole street and not just No 10 in the same way as ‘Whitehall’ is often used to refer to the government in general.
      1. Yes, that makes sense; and I suppose Downing Street is something of a generic term in the same way Whitehall is, if not as common.
  21. Had to do this in dribs and drabs, but had almost the same experience as koro – first run through the acrosses and the only one that went in was CUSHY – however with some checking letters from the downs, away we go
  22. A Black Monday!

    I was put in a bad mood early on by 5dn, which obviously led to LAENDER. So my praises for the setter – for recognising (for once) that it was possible to represent Länder perfectly well in English without using an umlaut – turned to curses when I realised the answer had to be LEANDER. Grrr!!!

    I then managed to type in LENIN as LINEN and didn’t spot it on my final check-through. And finally I spent ages on RING, not spotting a boxing ring.

    Feeling old and tired. 🙁

  23. 13:41 here, pretty straightforward I thought, and didn’t even consider most of the alternatives mentioned above. Except for BEARD, my LOI, where BOARD was very tempting but unsatisfactory. When you break it down though, you’re given an animal that fits B?A? which is a synonym for grumpy (BOAR with a sore head? Nah!) + D. 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing 🙂
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