Guardian Prize 28,404 by Picaroon

72 comments on “Guardian Prize 28,404 by Picaroon”

1. Thanks to Picaroon and PeeDee. I got BEST but not the off the field reference and turned to Google for the composer TAVENER before finally spotting the inclusion.

2. Thanks PeeDee. I found this hard though with the benefit of hindsight there is no good reason why I should have done. Maybe because my knowledge of music is something less than rudimentary (despite that, or perhaps because, it was drummed into me at school) and since on initial inspection the proliferation of SCOREs seemed to indicate that as a theme. Which it was, partly at least, but cleverly extended to all other meanings that I can think of. I had 24d before 24a and spent some time trying to find a colleague for Bach who might fit into 8a. Spent some more time trying to fit ‘Bede’ plus e into 15a but could only come up with ‘Zebedee’ which wasn’t much help. LOI was 4d and I’m still not very happy with ‘tactile’=’material’.

3. Getting the theme meaning(s) was not a challenge like the previous prize’s CO, but it took me considerably longer to solve, for some reason. Not a complaint, I thought it was perfectly pitched as a (would-be) prize.

   MARADONA was a fave when the penny dropped. It’s not an easy clue, imo, but is helped by 25a which suggests that it and 24 (BEST) are of the same type. It doesn’t help if you misread that as 24d (I know, I know) and spend too long trying to figure out a connection with BACH, just as Biggles@2 (Maybe they both put on airs?)

   I thought the only marginally iffy clue or clue section was the “drink at home” part of RAMEAU. The French composer could have been living abroad, and his foreign spouse could have banned French from ever being spoken at home again (because of that unfortunate incident with the meat cleaver last year), making the clue not work at all. I don’t understand why nobody thought of that.

4. Well, that was fun! I loved the various different meanings of score. Alas I didn’t finish as I was wholly banjaxed by 4,6 and 14. Even though I now I know the answers I’m still not sure I’d have ever got 4 & 6. But fun stuff as I said so thanks Picaroon and Peedee

5. Maradona’s handball is like the Chappell brothers’ underarm ball… never to be forgotten. And George Best is one of the few former greats I do know, and yes his extra-curricular scoring too is legendary. Otoh, can’t imagine Bach playing away given the size of his brood, and given his immense output you do have wonder how he found time for it all. Yes, the variety of scores was well woven, can’t remember how hard it was but it was fun. Thanks Pickers and PeeDee.

6. Thank you for the blog, nice use of the theme here. I can’t recall any major issues, will see what the comments bring up later.

7. I seem to have got into the way of doing two Guardian crosswords a week: whichever one turns up in our paper copy of the Guardian Weekly, and the Saturday not-actually-a-prize-right-now. That means that this week I went right from Brendan’s recent riff on the word ‘part’ to Picaroon’s collection of scores and scorers. In both cases I was amazed by the range of uses English can find for one word. I found Picaroon the harder of the two, and struggled for quite a long while to get SIGHT READS, and again at the end with ENHEARSE (which I worked out but was surprised to find was a word, and I see the spell-checker at play as I type shares my surprise, having underlined it in red). Very entertaining, and all very nicely clued; thanks to both Picaroon and PeeDee.

8. An excellent experience last Saturday, albeit spread over two distinct sessions with a need for inspiration in between. Sometimes I find an overtly signalled theme, as with this one, quite intimidating at first glance. Like Biggles A, I feared my fairly average knowledge of music would be a problem. But no, it was a real pleasure to tease out the varied versions of score with those leading to MARADONA, CASANOVA, SHEET MUSIC, ADDICTS and the humble TWENTY giving particular pleasure. As Dr WhatsOn pointed out, 25a does help: I’d got BACH but not the dextrous Argentinian at the time.

   I thought TAVENER an outstanding lurker (if that’s not a contradiction in terms); SECULARISM was a lovely anagram and I was delightfully misdirected by both COLD SORE and the beautiful MANY. Unfortunately QUAVER reminds me of one of the least food like snack foods it’s been my misfortune to eat – and they don’t seem to have changed from the cloying polystyrene of my youth! Finally, I was surprised to discover ENHEARSE exists and am amazed anyone bothered to invent it. You wouldn’t catch me dead using that.

   Thanks Picaroon and PeeDee

9. Could someone explain the meaning of 25A STRIPS? A soccer term? I got the answer from the wordplay, but did not understand it. Otherwise, a clever and satisfying solve.

10. [At 8ac, ‘half of aria’ gave us AR, but if only we had VAR back in 1986, then ‘scored manually’ would have been ruled out and I’m be much happier. I’ll get over it one day. Cheating little…]

    Thanks Picaroon and PeeDee

11. Cineraria @9: a football strip is the kit worn by a particular club.

12. PostMark @11: Thanks. Makes perfect sense now.

13. [PostMark @8 I enjoyed your ‘catch me dead’ quip and hope that none of us are subject to enhearsement for many years. Maradona had a lying in state prior to his burial, so presumably he was rehearsed.]

14. It took me a lot longer than 90 minutes to score the winner but worth chasing the ball, even if it went over my head often. BEST went to my Grammar school but alas, that’s were the similarity ended. He left after a year because it only played rugby, a wise body swerve by one so young.
    Favourites were the other ‘naughty’ boys, MARADONA and CASANOVA. Another cute quip PM @8 🙂

    Ta Picaroon & PeeDee

15. From frustration to eventual satisfaction. I do like themes with multiple meanings – clever stuff.

    Dr. WhatsOn @3: Good point made in 3rd paragraph:)

16. Meant to be smiley at end. How do you do them?

17. [Pedro @16: here you go. 😀 ]

18. Thanks PM, I hadn’t left a space 🙂

19. I was pleased to nearly finish this but stumbled on STRIPS at 21ac, even through I got the idea of them putting on shirts and was trying to find ways of working in ‘kit’ or ‘ten’. I even knew the term ‘strip’ but it didn’t occur to me and now I know why. I had ‘TREBLE’ instead of ‘TWENTY’ at 21d. I thought you can get a treble line in choir music, and googling cricket terms have me the idea that trebles have something to do with double wickets. Did anyone else do the same? And does anyone else sigh every time a golf/cricket/football clue comes up, and long for something a little less gendered (I’m a Guardianista) or, since women do actually play those games, at least fewer from the sports world? Maybe the female setters could give us one stuffed with clues from the domestic domain, just for a change?

20. Or, to put it less grumpily, anyone for placket?

21. LauraJ @19: no reason for it to be one of the female setters who clues a domestically themed puzzle… 😉

    I’m no cricket buff and I really know nothing of your level of knowledge: the treble you are thinking of might be the hat trick? In many sports, if one player scores three times it’s called a hat trick. In cricket, for the bowler, that translates to dismissing three batsmen with three successive balls. Sincere apologies if you did actually already know that (or had forgotten that you knew that 🙂 )

22. Thanks to Picaroon and PeeDee, this was a fun experience. Half an eyebrow raised at the 1970s slang use of ‘score’ for success with the opposite sex, I guess the meaning is pretty clear. PostMark @8 picked out a lot of my favs too, though I am surprised that equating 20-20 to cricket hasn’t raised more hackles (personally I am fine with T20, even looking forward to seeing the Hundred, but a lot of people aren’t!).

    LauraJ @19 — I concur, even speaking as a beneficiary of sporting references, these clues must be super-challenging if you are not ‘in’. I would say not only a gender bias but a ‘rest of world’ bias — Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal is really only complained about by England football fans — I personally was looking for a basketballer to ‘score manually’. I had a laugh at your @20 follow-up too — it would certainly be fun to have a theme from a less laddish viewpoint.

23. [LauraJ @19&20 In the ’50s, ‘continental’ football kit was introduced with shiny synthetic fabrics, short sleeves and v-necks. Prior to that football shirts were mostly long-sleeved flannelette featuring collars and plackets.]

24. [Penfold @23: back of the net]

25. [LauraJ – I have spent the last 14 years looking after our home and bringing up our kids. Why would that make me female? There are articles on Womens’ football and cricket in the Guardian every day. Time has moved on! ]

26. Congratulations to Picaroon for a great puzzle that had me beaten squarely and entirely fairly.
    The Saturday Prize normally offers some reassurance that the old brain has not entirely run out of steam, but I managed only have a dozen solutions on this one. Nevertheless I had an interesting week in trying to solve it and a lot of fun in discovering the solutions this morning. Even in crosswords, failure can sometimes be just as pleasurable as success.

27. [PeeDee @25 – Indeed so. I pondered making an intervention along those lines, but feared that I might couch it intemperately. I too have managed our domestic sphere for more than a decade. LauraJ’s comment struck me as very odd coming from someone who announced herself as a Guardianista.]

28. As a sucker for double meanings, I found this a delight. Maybe AFTERSHAVE my absolute favourite. For once, almost decoded it all. Just the RAM of RAMEAU. Great clueing. Well done to all inc PostMark and Penfold.

29. An excellent puzzle with a very good use of the scoring theme.

    I did have an exclamation mark by 16d ENHEARSE. While I didn’t doubt that it existed, along the lines of “entrain”, is it a word that is ever actually used? (Looking it up in the SOED, I see that we can also have “encurtain” and “enisle” amongst others.)

    Many thanks Picaroon and PeeDee.

30. I found this very difficult to get started, although I did spot the hidden TAVERNER as my FOI. It was well worth the struggle though; even if I didn’t score as much as I should have. Talking of scoring, I thought the clue for CASANOVA was great. I also enjoyed the misleading ‘at home’ in 22D that did not give ‘in’ as per usual. Another double-ticked clue was the one for MARADONA. I don’t think the ‘hand of God’ incident really affected the overall result; he scored a wonderful, legal, goal soon after.

    Thanks to Picaroon for the entertainment and PeeDee for the disentanglement.

31. Lord Jim @29; for ENHEARSE, Collins gives it as literary. Most of the quotations in the OED are fairly old, but I did find a more recent one on Wiktionary:
    2002, X. J. Kennedy, “Mustafa Ferrari” in The Lords of Misrule, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 23,[4]
    Dutifully we queue
    By twosomes for each surrey cloaked in black
    To pull up and enhearse us.

32. [Lord Jim @ 29 –

    from Matthew Arnold’s poem, ‘To Marguerite: continued’

    Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d,
    With echoing straits between us thrown,
    Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
    We mortal millions live alone.
    The islands feel the enclasping flow,
    And then their endless bounds they know.

    This might be an attractive verb for someone with Conradian predilections, I’d have thought.

33. At first my heart slumped when I assumed that the ‘scorers’ would be a list of footballers (since my knowledge about the game would scarcely fill the back of Fratton Park ticket). But then I perked up when I realised how ingenious Picaroon was with the range of ‘scorers’.
    A lovely puzzle!

34. [PeeDee @25 – but have we ever had a female footballer or cricketer in the crossword?]

    As for the puzzle – scorchio!

35. [Hi Essex boy @34 – I have never seen one yet, but hopefully it is only a matter of time. We have female tennis players in puzzles. Unless there is some subtle irony that I am missing, a woman footballer would be of no interest anyway as only men are interested in sport, women are interested in domestic affairs.]

36. essexboy@34 I seem to remember Rachel Heyhoe Flint (later Baroness Heyhoe-Flint) appearing many moons ago. My favourite was TAVERNER. Great puzzle this, many thanks Picaroon and PeeDee

37. [Robi @31 and Spooner’s catflap @32: thanks both. Yes, “enisle” is actually a lovely word. There is something about the “en-” prefix that seems to be inherently poetic:

    Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue
    (Shakespeare, Richard II)]

38. essexboy @34, PeeDee @35 and SPANIARDS @36
    Guardian 25115 13ac
    Batty Ms Flint announcing her resignation? (5-2)

39. Lo siento SPanza!

40. Thanks all, as soon as I posted @34 I thought, someone’s going to find one! Although going back to 2010 does kind of reinforce the point.

    I don’t think Laura @19 was suggesting that women have no interest beyond domestic affairs – just that, out of the set of people who find football etc tedious, women may well be more than averagely represented, ergo puzzles majoring on that theme are disproportionately sigh-inducing.

41. Thanks PeeDee, like many I was delighted at the Brendanesque range of uses to which the theme word was put as it could otherwise have been very heavy going. Made the same schoolboy error as Biggles A@2 & DrW@3 despite knowing the convention, and cheated a bit to get RAMEAU as I knew it must be a French composer I never heard, of ending in EAU: the butter was a step too far – should have been patient and waited for crossers of course but I was getting nowhere in the SE. Even then this excellent puzzle took many repeat visits and I would love someone to explain why MARADONA took so long when that image is burned on my brain as one of my strongest memories of 80s sport (as Robi@30 points out it has sadly overshadowed his other incredible goal in that game).

    Anyway thanks Picaroon, i think SIGHT READS scores highest for me, out of many worthy contenders.

42. Thanks Picaroon for a superb puzzle and PeeDee for the blog.

    Re RAMEAU and ‘at home’, I saw ‘at home’ as being ‘in France’, as wherever in the world Rameau might have been an whatever his domestic language there, France would always be ‘home’ for him.

43. Gazzh re Bredanesque – I mistakenly wrote “Thank you Brendan” at the top of this blog. It was only just before publication that I noticed the puzzle was actually by Picaroon.

44. [LauraJ@19 I hear that Good Housekeeping’s crossword has a theme of “scourers” this month, maybe worth a try?
    Sorry! and I do agree that it can be dull/tough when too much GK lies outside one’s areas of interest: my own weaknesses are highbrow musical terms and Classics but surprisingly little of that here and there were at least a range of references from culture, with the sportsmen being fairly well known outside their field, i reckon.]

45. Got stuck halfway and was struggling until Ms Womble & I put her heads together. It was her who saw the very clever Maradona first. For the 2nd week I missed the the clue in plain sight again & although I thought of Tavener was trying to justify it with rent equalling dugout & was about to moan about out being used as a reversal indicator. Doh!

46. Interesting that the suggestion of a crossword less focused on the traditionally masculine sphere should be met immediately with personal criticism of the suggester and a lot of what-about-men-ery. No, we should not assume that such a crossword must be provided by one of the female setters, or that men would find it any trickier than the usual cricket-and- cars fare, but it’s a good idea, all the same.

47. Lord Jim @37 – a good quotation from one of my favourite plays. What Mowbray means in that speech, of course, is that, by banishing him the kingdom, Richard is sending him to a place where he cannot speak his native English, and that he is, as he puts it, ‘ … too far in years to be a pupil now,’ although he declares himself to be only 40. So clearly the alleged national inability/refusal to learn foreign languages and use them when travelling abroad is not new. I have good French and passable Italian, but my two sons both had to be taken out of modern languages at school despite my attempts to help them. ? So years of pointing at items on menus with engaoled tongue lie ahead for Mowbray and for them.]

48. In Guardian 24,712 Araucaria came up with:
    Cricket captain, watched at Lords, re-settled (9,7)

49. Thanks PeeDee and of course Picaroon. Others have covered all the delights.
    [@19 LauraJ I hear you. And @20 very funny.
    I use this site on my mobile so it would take me too long to type a full answer to some of the responses this post got. It would take a much more articlulate commentator than I to be succinct but if you are familiar with the concept of ‘whataboutery’ (which at 12 letters could be found in a Guardian grid) then maybe a pause for thought before posting might be in order? @25 and @27.]

50. [Firstly an apology to LauraJ for a comment that in retrospect I can see as personal. Sorry about that. I guess I spent the last part of my life telling my two girls that they can do whatever they damn-well-like: don’t listen to any of this sport is for boys homemaking is for girls nonsense. I’m projecting something onto LauraJ’s comment that I’m sure she did not mean]

51. A pleasant puzzle with some fun clues. For me it confirmed my view that Saturday is the new Monday – and none the worse for that. LOI was 2d because there a lot of synonyms for piece.

    [Late to bed last night because by the time I got to the blog there were 143 comments…….some of them quite interesting]

52. Lovely. Favourite clue was for RAMEAU, for the “drink at home” part and because his music is lovely. Incidentally, PeeDee, in your explanation of 22a you call a ram a goat, which could lay you open to charges of sheep worrying.

53. I think both Arachne and mutmeg have had a fair sprinkling of cricket references over the years.

54. Fine puzzle and well-rung chimes, Picaroon Thanks for the help, PeeDee.

    Did anybody else try to wedge ASTHMA in where CORSET ought to go?

    Why did MOZART “rapidly” score?

    Thanks for explaining SHEET MUSIC, PeeDee. I got the anagram of “meth” and “use” but there had to be more — never saw “sic” for “thus.”

    I couldn’t believe “enhearse” was actually a word, it looked so put-together, but there it is in E-Collins.

    Thanks again, both.

55. A tough and great puzzle from Picaroon which took our combined brains to crack – and it was MrsW who got MARADONA from the wordplay – and then the penny dropped for us both with the definition. Thanks also to PeeDee for the blog.

56. Valentine @ 54

    He wrote over 600 works in his 35 years, starting at age 5. So he’d have had to be pretty quick.

57. Miche @52 – quite so! I have seen “goat” for “butter” so often that I just wrote it in on autopilot, out of habit. Blog fixed now.

58. No hay problema, Penfold @39!!

59. PeeDee @57 – in the great Internet tradition that, when correcting an error, one introduces another error, I wrote 22a when I meant 22d.

60. A great puzzle cleverly built on the multi-faceted ‘score’ theme, continuing a run of excellent Saturday puzzles, most of them themed and most of them not too easy.
    I slowed down after solving three of the quadrants, leaving myself with the trickier top right, where I found my top four clues: for OPERATIC, LITERARY, PRIMUS and AFTERSHAVE.
    Thanks to Picaroon, PeeDee and other commenters.

61. Enjoyed this a lot. MARADONA was the first or second I got and I was worried that it would be a bunch of football references that I don’t get, but the only other player was BEST who I’ve figured out about by now, and 25 came from the wordplay. I thought it was “following”=AFTER and then “sweet” S and was prepared to be cranky about S for sweet, but I guess it is simply a word we don’t use in the US?

    RESULT and SIGHT-READS were particularly pleasing wordplay and SCRATCH was one of the better double definitions I’ve seen. Thanks to Picaroon and PeeDee!

62. I didn’t know STRIPS as a footy uni, but the answer was obvious from the wordplay.
    This was a very enjoyable puzzle, so it scored highly with me. Gems were 11a AFTERSHAVE, 14a LITERARY, and 6d SIGHTREADS for the nice surfaces and deceptive constructions. Thanks Picaroon and PeeDee for the fun and elucidation.

    Dr. WhatsOn@3, I agree with your RAMEAU concern, but I always thought it was a machete.

    [ Will the Brits ever get over losing that football match in 1986? ]

    [ PostMark@8 and Penfold@13, enough of the macabre wordplay already – please cist and decease. ]

63. [Cello @ 62: will we ever get over winning that one 20 years earlier? They think it’s all over…

    Consider me betired and gone to red.]

64. Just wanted to drop in to thank PeeDee for the excellent and comprehensive blog.

    Hope everyone’s enjoying the sunshine!

65. Beautifully executed theme. This took me two or three visits and it was annoying that I was stumped by SIGHT READS until I fed the crossers to Word Wizard and it came back with exactly one possibility, shortly followed by the crash of a teatray.

    I got STRIPS from the wordplay, which finally put paid to the notion that I was looking for a BACH oppo, and MARADONA’s def jumped out at me after that.

    [Grantinfreo @5, far from being “never to be forgotten”, the Chappell brothers’ underarm ball was, for me, a never-been-heard-of. However, I’m glad to have had such an interesting incident, in a sport I don’t really follow, brought to my attention, so thanks.]

66. I’m surprised at the number of commenters who were misled into thinking that 25a ‘What 8 and 24 put on ‘ was a reference to 24d BACH rather than 24a BEST. My understanding is that in an across clue, references to other across clues are simply the clue number; similarly if there is only one clue with that number (like 8). Thus if it had been BACH that was intended, the clue would have read ‘What 8 and 24 down put on’. I’ve seen this convention in action many times, so I’m sure there was no intention to mislead on Picaroon’s part.

67. PeeDee, no need for an apology, and thanks for the blog. Glad my comments on gender provoked some discussion, and that it was civilized (as I’d expect from lurking on this blog for a few years).

68. SH@66, you’re absolutely right about the convention, of course, and I was a fool not to look more closely. I think it was just that I had BACH in some time before BEST, so was already trying to find a link.

69. Came across this on Quora today, and thought I’d post the link for wordies who happen to remain tuned in to this post (hello Picaroon!):

    https://qr.ae/pG1x0T

70. Quite tough but it was fun to see all the different uses of the word ‘score’. I found the top half easier than the bottom half. SE corner was hardest for me, and I could not fully parse three of my solutions.

    Favourites: CASANOVA, SIGHT-READS, SHEET MUSIC, ADDICTS

    New: John TAVENER, ENHEARSE (but it made sense to me)

    Did not parse:
    5d RAT = desert
    22d = RAM + EAU?
    21d TWENTY = doubled in cricket

    Thanks, Picaroon and blogger.

71. An enjoyable and sometimes challenging crossword, thank you Picaroon. I hope it won’t cause anyone any offence if I add that the discussion on gender and crossword themes made my heart sink. The idea of crosswords needing to be more relatable to women is one I struggle with – can’t we just be people? Some of us are interested in sport, some aren’t. Who decides what women are/should be interested in? What on earth is a crossword that’s meant to appeal more to women supposed to look like? I just want to solve crosswords set by people for people. And yes, I am female. Thank you for letting me get this off my chest!

72. PS Just realised this crossword was from March 27th and I should have made these comments over a month ago!! Doh!

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