| Comments on the competition |
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| 1. |
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| Good fun all round. I thought clue 20 was the stand-out winner, apposite and brief, with 'Rob' particularly neat. Clue 15 seemed to me by far the best of the TESTES efforts, with 'supporters' working very nicely. I gave 3 points to clue 9, pleasingly succinct and a nice ref. to a World Cup moment I remember well. These three clues were by far the best in my view. |
| 2. |
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20 – a faultless clue, I feel – anecdotal, smart word-play and efficient – 5 points. One to frame and stick on the wall.
49 – Charming – 3 points.
33 – Neat, like the word-play – 2 points.
Ten others I gave a half-point for being fairly solid with some interesting ideas and fluency, but lacking perhaps the same degree of flare or crispness demonstrated by the above: 12 15 16 17 23 31 34 36 39 50.
A personal thing – I found others a bit too busy or contrived; and a number inconsistent with the instructions, being not football-y enough in the surface reading. |
| 3. |
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Many of the clues were over long and/or too convoluted for what was quite an easy exercise with the scope offered with the extra word and the short subsidiary part to clue. The use of more than 10 words, in my view, indicated lack of cluemanship, and initial letter devices, centres of words, etc, were a complete cop-out under the circumstances.
One or two words chosen had etymologies which meant that the half word was too similar to the full word for my liking. At the other end of the spectrum, I thought HOTSHOTS and TESTES were interesting choices. There were a few good and topical clues for these (e.g. 43, 45 and 22) which drew most of my votes. Unfortunately 15 seemed to be clued the wrong way round – surely TEES is spurned by E? |
| 4. |
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| This was a fun challenge and it was good to see so much imagination going into creating clues with a World Cup theme. Everyone seems to have stuck to the rules, though I felt that adding a link word between the extra word and the rest of the clue (8 and 31), or other superfluity (26?) was a yellow card offence. My favourite clues combined a recognisable World Cup reference with a fluent surface. The best three were 37, 45 (great definition) and 46, followed by 15 (how come I never thought of TESTES?!), 32 and 48 (any vuvuzela clue had an immediate advantage). I also liked 7, 9, 13, 19, 23 and 40. |
| 5. |
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A dog's dinner, make that two – an impression of both the tournament and this competition – inspired by 19 which features surely the best clue-word used. That entry is one of no fewer than ten clues entered with explanations NOT in the format suggested by the organisers. A smaller number gave the details in the correct order, but without any punctuation. Very few entries reveal any thought given to the solver's first task – to identify the word to be omitted – and so to make it more of a challenge by arranging that any word, or at least most words, when removed, would still leave a readable clue. However, in the end I did not let these misgivings affect my votes.
I selected seven clues :-
10 Elegant, apt, and witty – 5 points
7 Sound construction, straight to the point – 3 points
22 Apt and very well honed – good surface(s) – 2 points
45 The best of the 'testes/balls' clues – 2 points
15 'spurned' is a very classy feature here – 1 point
17 Let's hear it for Germans and Aussies, beautifully disguised def. – 1 point
19 Spoilt by a disjointed 'thrash', but a great attempt – 1 point
Other clues
49 Better than many of those above, but 'with' superfluous content, great pity
11 Brilliantly worked surface and subsidiary, definition needs improving
16 A gem, but I suspect many will judge it to be a bit off-focus, unlike 17
18 "'i" for "in" needs to be flagged by some means for the majority of solvers
30 Reminiscent of Baldrick's riddles, baffling surface & no real definition
46 High quality in every respect. Not a central theme for most, however |
| 6. |
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| Very difficult to judge on a free-for-all choice of words to clue. I was staggered by the number of testes clued (closely followed by a good handful of can-cans). Ignored any lacking football-related surfaces – points otherwise allocated to th shorter punchier efforts. |
| 7. |
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| I thought this the most successful and fruitful "special" for some time, with plenty of imaginative ideas on show. Among the best were the Rob Green idea (although I'd have preferred a rearrangement so as to get the capitalised Rob first) and the equating of testes with tackle (perhaps not anatomically exact but clever nonetheless). One possible concern with the format, though; it's obvious from many of the words chosen that TEA or similar was used to source them (my own entry included) and so perhaps some may be at a disadvantage, or perhaps even disinclined to enter, which would be a pity. |
| 8. |
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| HOTSHOTS poses a tricky question – should it be rewarded as a literal interpretation of "made up of two identical halves" or disregarded on the grounds that it is made up of HOT and SHOTS? Since nothing in the preamble specifically rules it out, I go for the former. |
| 9. |
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| In judging I felt a relevance to the SA competition important, especially Rob Green's howler which summed up England's paltry performance for me! |
| 10. |
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| Tricky task approached imaginatively by most entrants — a lot of balls, I noticed! |
| 11. |
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Some lovely ideas but also lots of clues made unsound by the use of linking words which implied that, for example, BUL is the same as BUL-BUL, which it isn’t. This is something repeatedly mentioned by Azed over the years (Slips 1200, 1441, 1459, 1596, 1707, 1914 ).
Some of the linking words used were ‘as’ (4), ‘in’ (8 and 13), ‘for’ (12 and 26), 'is’ (39 and 41) and ‘prove to be’ (44).
One can normally work round the problem (eg High kicking action? Crouch has the power) but avoiding them does make life harder.
My favourite clue was 48 (where the ‘as’ is part of the definition), then 18, 17, 3 and 1. |
| 12. |
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It is amazing that so many people can't obey simple instructions. After wondering whether or not it really mattered, I eventually discarded all clues that weren't in the correct format (give or take a colon or a semi-colon). My votes eventually (a good lot of clues I felt) were
1st (3.5 points): 20
2nd (2.5 points): 21
3rd (2 points): 37
4th (1.5 points]: 23
5th (1 point): 36
6th= (0.5 points each): 3, 7, 10, 12, 16, 22, 39, 45, 49 |
| 13. |
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Part of the challenge was that the clue should have a footballing surface. In my view, it was not enough simply to introduce the name of a character associated with football, but in a non-footballing context (eg, 10 or even 41), let alone simply to mention a World Cup venue in this way (eg, 6, 8). Beyond that, I gave more credit to surfaces dealing with actual events (especially events associated with the World Cup) than to those involving (as far as I can discover – my apologies if this is down to my ignorance of the game) purely imaginary incidents (1, 3, 12, 33 and 50) or vague generalizations (2, 23, 25, 40, 42). Unfortunately, quite a few of the clues that met these criteria were seriously flawed (eg, 5 – indirect anagram – 20 – I don’t think “Rob Green’s last” can mean “Green after last has been taken away” – 26 – “who” plays no valid part – 31 – “by” ditto – 35 – “no longer” ditto – 46 – “heads” does NOT mean “heads of” – 34 and 44 – “set back” and “setback” are NOT the same thing). 24, 32 and 49 also sailed fairly close to the wind wrt soundness (much as I liked other aspects of 24 and 49 especially). In the economical 9, a “can” and a “potty” may have the same purpose, but they are not, unfortunately, the same thing. In 16 and 19, the definitions made dubious sense in the context of the surface, while 17, though it had an excellent definition, was rendered very stilted by the need to include “team”.
My votes as follows:
2 points each: 15, 21, 37
1.5 points each: 22, 24, 29, 43
1 point each: 7 32 49 |
