We recently ran this special themed grid to mark the commencement of the IPL 2020. The grid was designed after a casual Twitter exchange with Mr. W.V.Raman who had made this suggestion.
After an initial struggle and a few iterations, I was able to design a unique grid which had the letters I P L prominently in the center and the colors of the Indian flag in the background – quite a contrast to the normal Black & White combination found in cryptic crosswords.
It also featured the names of the captains of all the IPL teams M.S.Dhoni, K.L.Rahul, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Rohit Sharma, Steve Smith, D.Warner and D.Karthik as grid entries. In addition to the 8 captains, the grid fill included names of 5 other cricketers viz., Bravo, Gayle, Shaw, Asif and Nair, all of whom were playing in the IPL this year. 4 cricketing terms such as “out“, “shy”, “leg” and “slip”, were also successfully incorporated into this thematic grid fill.
The entry that was bang in the middle was ‘God” which was a nod Sachin Tendulkar – literally the cricketing “GOD” to all his fans. There was a Clue Acrostic in the grid, so that first letters of the all the clues in the grid, spelt out the message “ALL THE BEST TO THE IPL TEAMS N PLAYERS”.
The puzzle got a lot of visibility with 1,140 views (Thanks to celebrity endorsement from @joybhattacharj
and @wvraman) during the time it was open for solving!. 60 solvers managed to complete and submit the grid, and 30 went on to get the maximum possible score of 125.
One amongst the “all correct” entries was picked by lucky draw to receive an autographed copy of Mr. W.V.Raman’s book “The Winning Sixer”. The lucky winner is “Narayan Mandyam” , an engineer and an alumnus of IIT, Bombay. Narayan is a regular participant in the Indian Crossword League (IXL)’s annual crossword contests and has also actively participated in all the 1ACGrids since inception. He also loves to encourage youngsters to learn cryptic crosswords. Narayan was extremely thrilled to receive the prize and admits that this is probably the first time that he actually won something of value in a “lucky draw”.
Thanks to Mr.W.V.Raman and Congrats to Mr. Mandyam. Here’s wishing you many more awards in future too. Thanks to all of our solvers who took part and made this fun.
