I see that this is Tringa’s fifth Listener puzzle. In the last one he reminded us of Lady Mondegreen.We are warned that we will be hunting for 22 misprints in clue definitions. Their correct letters will give us an instruction and two steps involved. Our solving will also produce 18 clashes and we must ‘disregard’ TRINGA IN SNUB in 12 of those (revealing the theme) and present the remaining six thematically.There’s some originality here (but not a lot of alcohol – with a LABEL ‘Describe end of fictional murder victim (5)’, Tringa maybe just squeezes into the Listener setter oenophiles).
This part of the Dash setting team has found the crosswords tough for the last few weeks, Gill kindly stepped in last week to cope with the numerical, but, with a few exceptions, the solutions went in speedily this week, especially after BLADISHMENTS and UNMITIGATEDLY, BOOGALOO and SPOOKERY, SOOT and TEGU filled the perimeter (Note those strategically placed double Os!)
That bunch of clashes in rows 10 and 11 suggested that it was there, with perhaps the NC clash in the heart of the grid, that we had to disregard TRINGA IN SNUB. What a red herring for this Numpty! BENET BALLADE appeared Which didn’t make much sense with the message the corrected misprints were giving: MARK COURT/ LINK Os/ CIRCLE C. After an entertaing read through Benet’s poems about sycamores etc. I finally saw the NETBALL TEAM and all became clear.
We had to link those Os to draw the lines on a netball court and reorder those six remaining clashes (we already had the C in a circle) to give the team players. What a fine construction, Tringa!