“16C – SpurTed” from “Sceptic Cryptic” is our seventeenth grid for this season.

Stats: 60 solvers attempted this puzzle.  42 solvers completed the puzzle, two of whom did not complete the bonus form. Only 14 solvers got the full score.

Here is the Grid:
(Annotations will be visible on solving the puzzle or on clicking “Reveal Grid”. Logged in solvers can see their submissions as well)

Bonus Questions:

1. Identify the 7 theme words. The clues and the title will help you identify the theme.
   
   Solution

   Ans: TON ( Eg-Everton), LAN ( Eg-INTER MILAN), POOL (Eg- Liverpool), SEA( Eg-Chelsea), REAL ( Eg-Villareal), RID ( Eg. Real Madrid), LACE(Eg-Crystal Palace). The Theme is Football Clubs.

   The Title is 16C SpurTed – 16Across is Football + C (Clubs)- so Football Clubs.
   Tottenham HotSPUR and Manchester UniTED being two examples to show that the last 3 or 4 letters of the club are used.

   This was also hinted by the Clue Acrostic that read “NAMES OF FOOTBALL CLUBS LAST PART ONLY”

Here’s the list of Top Scorers (For the full list, please check the Leaderboard in the Hall of Fame)

Out of 60 solvers,  42 completed the puzzle and only 14  got the full score. Each of the following scored 151 points (Grid Score – 144,  Bonus – 7).

Al Sanders
Arvind Ramaswamy
Harish T K
Jyothish Balakrishnan
Lakshmi Prakash
Mona Sogal
Nilesh Parmar
Prakash Arumugam
Ramki Krishnan
Rathnakumar V
Samit Kallianpur
Tejas Siddharth
Venkatesan P.
Venkatraghavan S

Congrats to the toppers and to all the solvers who participated.

Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good rating of 8.4. It was rated a perfect 10 by 6 out of the 40 folks who voted (15%). The lowest rating was 5.

Favourite Clues:  The Top clues were

1. 16A France to Brazil basically, all love playing this game (8) – 11 votes
2. 13A Oops – student held back after school (4,2) – 8 votes
3. 32A Check out Chambers – basically both meanings are covered (6) – 8 votes
4. 19D A state of happiness without cash, extremely strange feeling (8) – 7 votes
5. 11A Examples for child to observe about conserving energy (10) – 7 votes

Nice puzzle with a smart end game and lovely clues. Nicely done Sceptic Cryptic. Keep ’em coming.

PS: The solvers comments are in the comments thread in the post.