Enigmatic Variations No.1107 – Strategy by Nutmeg

Nutmeg’s not giving too much away here.  The title, STRATEGY, is in some way inappropriate or at least has to be made ‘more appropriate’.  Someone or something ‘has a problem’, and the grid has to be ‘altered’ is some unspecified way.  Let’s hope we can get more from the clues.

We can.

There are quite a number of easier clues to get the solver into the puzzle, but even before that we can tell that the lengths of various clues have to be altered.  The crossing clues gave me a couple of the letters in 17ac, which began to look very much like LITTLE.  35 across was already looking like PATHOGENS, with the additional letters being HOG, so looking at 29 across and knowing that it was two words, it wasn’t too much of a leap to find BO BEEP.

Now, we all know LITTLE BO PEEP’s trouble, and having matching pairs of sheep to add and remove was a nice way of using the theme.  The six sheep are: EWE, HOG, LAMB, RAM, TEG and TUP.  Five of these six pairs are found in the grid.

The last thing is to find the new title.  The incomplete pair is TEG, so we take those letters from STRATEGY to give the very appropriate STRAY.

Notation
(xxx) = definition
{xxx} = (anagram/homophone/container/etc.) indicator
XXX* = anagram
< = reversal
xxx = unused letter(s)
Idlers=redundant word

Please post a comment if the explanations are not clear.