The Tigers took out the Bears on the Saturday night, it was raining on the Sunday so I was driving, LM was going for a swim near Bridge Road and Richmond, the suburb all of a sudden associated with success after the yellow-and-black’s recent spate of form, came to be our destination.

Flavours of Lakhoum proved yet again that exquisite food is always more important than amusingly deplorable service by being full, and we settled on Timbale, where the food is as easy to forget as the service.

TH and I had shared a drink to celebrate SH’s 30th the night before, so maybe the loosening of the rational ties that bind the mind and scupper the happy tangent was the reason for our defeating DA in significantly less than two hours. I like to think, though, that Joel Bowden’s slotting through the sealer the night before with only 23 seconds left on the clock had something to do with it, and that suffused through Richmond was an infectious confidence that seeped into our successful assault on the DA.

Surprisingly enough for a DA, only one clue featured a piece of trivia that was largely unbeknownst to us:

5 across: Composer fried edibles (7)

This was clearly an anagram of edibles for a composer, and with the help of a cross clue or two, we managed to get Delibes out as the answer. I seemed to recall a composer by that name in the dark recesses of my mind, but as experience has demonstrated many times over, some rather curious words are found in the dark recesses of one’s mind whenever they seem to fit what’s left of an almost-finished cryptic. Thankfully, concern over this particular area of contention was proven unnecessary after the answers were consulted.

And even more happily, what consulting the answers proved beyond doubt was that we were justified in leaving Timbale in time to pick up LM from the pool. DA had been vanquished, DA was dead; long live DA.