Listen With Others

“Ah, lovely!” I said. “With the detested numerical next week, we are going to have the joy of one about Shakespeare. Maybe we’ll be sitting in the Globe slotting in solutions about Hamlet or Lear!” But oh dear, from my favourite to one of my least favourite themes. We hadn’t solved long before a rather large number of soccerish clues emerged and even worse ‘RECENT FA CUP WINNERS’ with an instruction that each clash cell must contain ‘FIRST LETTER OF TOTAL WINS’. I remember that there used to be a newspaper competition called ‘Spot the Ball’ where you had to mark with  cross the likely position of the ball in soccer photos. That must be the synonym for ‘Observe the Globe’.

Of course I had scanned the clues to confirm that Awinger (is he really a winger? I used to have to play left wing in hockey and hated it – Manchester waterworks gave me the best present when the pipelines running from Thirlmere to Manchester ran through the school sports field and prevented us from playing for two years!) I digress – in between matches does AWINGER still retain his place among the oenophiles?

‘FA advise Pele to eschew energy drink (6)’. We extracted the FA from that and extracted a bit of Pele’s energy (E) leaving us TIP + PLE. The cup that men were grasping a few clues on just held ‘weak dye’ (we put Men = OR  round grasp = SEE round weak = ILL and Chambers told us that ORSEILLE is a dye. Things improved when we got to ‘Communist rogue delaying singular clarets etc (8, two words)’ We moved the S along in RED SWINE and got RED WINES. So Cheers, Awinger.

We don’t much enjoy clashes but these were rather different as it soon became clear that they were appearing where words were too long for their lights (Of course, we had a hint about that in the pre-ramble, when we were told that ‘Numbers in brackets are the lengths of grid entries.’) ALL ONE clashed with OVERTOILED and that gave us the letters of EVERTON, so we were at kick off, and soon found LIVERPOOL, SPURS, CHELSEA, MAN CITY, MAN UNITED. Extra words in the down clues told us what the notable occasion was – SEVEN YEARS AGO. Even I know that WIGAN beat MANCHESTER CITY and we saw that we had to find 20 letters in the grid to highlight – the three people who MANAGED, CHAIRED and SCORED.

We needed Wikipedia for that but, of course WHELAN, MARTINEZ and WATSON formed the shape of a goal and even gave us an E for Chelsea’s eight FA cup wins. We had to work backwards to find the words for PORTSMOUTH and ARSENAL (knowing that they had two and thirteen victories to their names so that a T had to be the letter that ultimately filled both clash cells – not easy but working backwards gave us SCOUTHER clashing with MOTOR SPORT, and KINESES with ALARUMS. Finally, we had to put a cross on Wigan’s ball, so cleverly going into the goalmouth in just the right spot. What clever setting! Even for a soccerophobe, this was impressive and we happily kicked Wigan’s winning goal into the net and put a cross on the ball. Many thanks to Awinger.