Financial Times 17,473 by GAFF

17 comments on “Financial Times 17,473 by GAFF”

1. Thanks, Gaff and loonapick!
   A great puzzle and an excellent and absolutely neat blog!

   Could see a few more ‘golf’ words:
   PAR, CARRY, PATE (Jerry Pate, a pro golfer), FLOP and SOCKET.
   There is a POOL game named GOLF.

   SCHOLAR
   I agree with your comment.

2. ROSS (Fisher) is in albatROSS. Was ‘seeing’ RORY but he isn’t there (learnt a word ‘pareidolia the other day. Maybe some such phenomenon)!!!

3. Ah, a golf theme. No wonder I missed it. It didn’t matter, because it was still enjoyable. Half a dozen clues rattled me a bit. I won’t say which because probably nobody cares.

   Thanks Gaff & Loonapick.

4. ‘Of course’ was clever, but I first read it as meaning ‘Gaff always does themed puzzles.’ I’ve obviously solved too many. I caught on to the golf about halfway through and enjoyed the theme. As Loonpick said, it was a fine effort to include so much thematic material. I especially liked the way Gaff clued ‘Liverpool.’ {KVa@2: If you’re looking for Rory, he’s at 1A. Rory Sparrow was a basketball player.}

5. Thanks for the blog, I agree with the person who first said that golf is a good walk spoilt , but I do think the theme was carried out well and the clues were generally good. Nice extras from KVa.
   LIV=54 is because on this Saudi backed tour they play only 3 rounds in a tournament.

6. Like GDU I missed the golf theme until I came to DORMIE which was my penultimate one in. Still a fun puzzle and clear blog.
   Thanks Gall and Loonapick.

7. LIVERPOOL was a very neat clue , PERUVIANS very clever, for MILLENNIAL I was led astray by Thoroughly Modern Millie for a while. DELTA is a very original double definition.

8. Gaff’s recent puzzles have been very tough and this was no exception, even with the theme (which I’m watching on TV at the moment). I managed to get everything in, but gave up trying to parse SCHOLAR properly and my last in DORMIE was little more than a guess; I knew it as a golf term but not its exact meaning and couldn’t parse it. Plenty of other difficulty ones including MILLENNIA, ALBATROSS and DELTA. I think DRAW NEAR could be taken as the ‘portrait artist’ having been unable to draw one of the two EAR(s) but I see what you mean.

   Thanks to Gaff and loonapick

9. I only belatedly twigged the meaning of ‘of course’ but I did catch the theme with entries in the lower half of the grid. I’m not familiar with the game but have come into contact with players, tournaments and apparel professionally so it wasn’t impossible as I had feared.
   PERUVIANS was my favourite and I wasn’t surprised to have that in common with Roz.
   Thanks to Gaff and Loonapick for clearing up quite a few.

10. Many ups and downs for me. I agree there were some tough clues (in particular, the subtractions were difficult for me). I started off at a steady clip, only to run into trouble about three quarters of the way through. I played golf as a kid but have not really followed it since. I had no idea the open is starting for example. Of course (pun intended), I too did not pick up on the theme until after I had written the last one in.

    I did this one on paper, and the sheet reflects my ‘ups and downs’ statement. There are many ticks for favourites (adding POWERLESS, SPARROW, SLASHED and DRIBBLING to those already mentioned), several crosses for clues that do not work (noted already), and several question marks for clues I did not understand or could not parse (thanks loonapick for explaining them). Like WordPlodder@8, DORMIE was my LOI, which I bunged in there with fingers crossed.

    Thanks loonapick for demystifying so many answers for me, and thank to Gaff for the puzzle

11. The breakaway golf tour was called LIV because they were only going to play 3 rounds. So 3 x 18 = 54 or LIV

12. Geoff@3 – I thought your use of the word “rattled” was apt, and I would be interested to hear what clues rattled you

13. Golf just makes me laugh on most levels . Dormie was my LOL

14. I enjoy this one, although I struggled in the bottom left hand corner for too long.

    Peruvians was my last one in, which I thought very clever indeed.

    I finally got Dormie ( a word I knew), which led to the rest of the bottom left, although I had no idea how to parse Millennia. I too thought it was something to do with thoroughly modern Millie.

15. Thanks to loonapick and to all the rest of you for the feed-back that I do always read.
    I wanted to share a small thought with you, prompted by your reaction to PERUVIANS.
    As well as setting crosswords I also do a little amateur magic, and I’ve realised that there is a common theme between these two endeavours, which is that a good clue/trick is not the one that is the most clever, but it is the one that the audience most enjoys.
    We setters aim to give you a mix of clue types (anagrams, cryptics, hidden words etc) and also difficulties. We want our puzzles to be a challenge but doable, and always enjoyable.
    We’ll never come up with 32 PERUVIANS in a puzzle, but we do try, and your feedback is a good reminder that enjoyable is what we should always be aiming for.
    All the best

16. I found this a challenging but steady and enjoyable solve. I do appreciate and admire a themed puzzle that still works for those who don’t get the theme (as a golf ignoramus, I was looking for women’s football or Ashes cricket and had to give up). I, too, liked Peruvians and dribbling. One gripe though: at 5a, I think a sleigh is a mode of transport while a sled is more of an out-of-control-sliding aid

17. Having no interest in golf (we share the opinion of it attributed to Mark Twain but know a few terms from their use in crosswords) the theme was lost on us – in fact we couldn’t get 20dn and only got LIVERPOOL because it fitted. So not our puzzle of the day.
    No problem, though with 5ac; Chambers has ‘a sledge, esp a small one; a drag or wheelless structure for conveying goods, esp on snow …’. Favourite was PERUVIANS.
    Thanks, Gaff and loonapick.

Comments are closed.