Thanks Sil for pointing out the latitude that this setter has more than others.

For someone south of the equator, the Gallicisms and English towns make for a tough slog.

[BTW, I do enjoy a bit of Gordius myself, but - I'm sorry - not too many bits of Rover. Having said that, some days ago, there was a late post at Bonxie's puzzle (# 29) that expressed a lot of my feelings about crosswords: first there's the overall Joy, than there's The Theory. And I liked that, I liked that, I li-i-iked that, etc (courtesy to Status Quo)]

Back to the puzzle. In 22d “entrance money” equates to “gate” exactly. At a sporting event the gate is both the total number of people who have paid to attend, and the total amount of money taken in entrance fees (also “gate-money”).

I am not sure if, to name a few, Gordius or Rover would have been appreciated for 1ac (GISCARD), which as benington (#12) pointed out, is just not right for ‘French politician’. No one would accept ‘Vaughan’ if the definition were ‘English composer’.
And talking about definitions, I know it’s Cryptic Land, and I smiled seeing ‘Moony’ as a definition in 9ac, but strictly speaking this not right either.
‘Moony’ is not synonymous to LUNAR – “He sat in lunar silence”?

In Bonxie’s puzzle last week, some posts were crying out loud:
“What is that ‘of’ doing here?”. Rightly so, but what is that ‘of the’ doing there in 14ac (HAWARDEN) other than making it a better surface?
‘Fruit of the forest’ would have been ARDEN-HAW, in my opinion.

And although it is defendable when you think about it very deeply, the order of the words in 25ac (ABYSMAL) is very questionnable (‘baby small’ instead of ‘small baby’?). The same for the clue of 19d, ‘Missing with cast’ = ‘cast missing w(ith)’?
Don’t get me wrong, I do understand all this, but it is not extremely precise, or is it?

Two of the theme clues (11ac and 22d) I still don’t get or like so far. I find 11ac still a bit loose, with references all over the place, and in in 23d I don’t see why ‘money’ is there. Maybe someone can explain this to me?

Even so, as I said, we liked it.
Best clue perhaps, in our opinion, 17ac (wrong-footing and an example of one of Araucaria’s specialities: ‘I’m inside’ for PRISONER, putting it in the ‘first person’).
But sometimes I think it is not fair that Araucaria gets away with things (at this site) while some other setters would have been heavily criticised.

PS, dear cholecyst (#5), is it really necessary to remind of that – at least, for me – torturous Pasquale GS crossword …….?

I would never have got the wordplay in 2dn! Also assumed that the horse was a ‘bay’…