Voting closes on Friday for the Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year award.

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So who should be on the six-man shortlist when it is announced on 14 April? And who will succeed Chelsea's Eden Hazard as the winner?
Ten BBC football pundits - Alan Shearer, Chris Waddle, Chris Sutton, Jermaine Jenas, Danny Murphy, Danny Mills, Kevin Kilbane, Pat Nevin, Mark Lawrenson and John Hartson - have revealed their six outstanding performers of 2015-16.
Scroll down to see who they have picked as their best player.
Shearer: "There are so many options for Player of the Year because there are so many questions still to be answered.
"If Harry Kane goes and scores six goals in Tottenham's last six games and they win the title, then it is him. If Jamie Vardy does the same for Leicester, he gets it.
"But if the season ended now, when the votes are being cast, I would go for Riyad Mahrez.
"He has brought brilliance and unpredictability to Leicester's title bid, and has been superb in terms of scoring goals, and making them."
Waddle: "I have always felt the vote was too early, going back to when I was a player.
"That's why I think Arsenal's Mesut Ozil will figure this year because when voting started he was on fire, even though he has gone off the boil a bit in the last few weeks.
"The award should reflect performances over the whole season, which is why a Leicester player should get it.
"As a Premier League footballer, Mahrez has basically come alive this season after showing a few glimpses of his ability at the end of 2014-15 when Leicester avoided relegation.
"My other contenders come from clubs near the top, apart from Willian, who has had a fantastic season even though Chelsea have been terrible. He is their only player to get close to the level he was at when they won the title last season."
Sutton: "I am a big fan of Robert Huth's old-fashioned defending, although I could easily have picked his team-mate Wes Morgan instead.
"Jamie Vardy has been absolutely sensational and is a far more intelligent player than people give him credit for. Yes he is fast and works hard, but the timing of his runs is terrific and we know he can finish.
"There are strong arguments for Vardy or Mahrez to be player of the year but, for me, Dimitri Payet has had the 'wow' factor.
"Payet cost West Ham just under £11m when he joined from Marseille in the summer. That is just run-of-the-mill money these days so I did not pay much attention to the signing at the time, but he has been a breath of fresh air.
"Watching the way West Ham play with Payet in the team is a bit like being back at school. He is their best player so they give him the ball and say 'make something happen' - and he does.
"He has got that unbelievable eye for a pass, on top of his free-kick ability, and he is one of those players who is a reason why fans buy tickets or turn on the TV.
"If I could watch him play every week I would. In fact, I would watch him train every day if I could - he has been that good."
Jenas: "Arsenal's form dropping off when it did will not have helped Ozil's chances. I still think he has been brilliant, though.
"There were a lot of question marks over him before the season started about whether he was doing enough to justify his £42m fee, so he deserves some recognition for all those assists and how he held the mantle for their title bid for so long.
"Mahrez should take the award, though. If Leicester win the league, it will be because of him.
"Although Vardy has scored more goals, Mahrez has put a lot of them on a plate for him."
Murphy: "What I love about Toby Alderweireld is that he is a superb defender who contributes to Tottenham's attacks too.
"He is so calm in possession and some of his long-range passing has been phenomenal to set Spurs off going forward.
"He has played every minute for Tottenham in the Premier League this season and we have seen how he is more than just a great player, he is a leader and an organiser too.
"Jan Vertonghen does not look as solid when he is playing with anyone else and, when he has been injured, Kevin Wimmer has benefited from playing with Alderweireld too.
"As far as the Player of the Year goes, though, it has to be Mahrez. What he has achieved has been phenomenal.
"Jamie Vardy's performances have been completely unexpected as well but, when you bring in Mahrez's all-round game and the big moments when he has delivered, he would edge it for me."
Mills: "After he broke through last season, nobody was sure Harry Kane could do it again, but he has done.
"What I like about him is that he does not have blistering pace; instead he is a very clever player.
"To score the number of goals he has, two seasons running, and be in line to be the first English striker to win the Premier League's golden boot since Kevin Phillips in 2000, is amazing enough anyway. To do it at the age of 22 is phenomenal."
Kilbane: "You could argue a case for so many different players - Romelu Lukaku has scored 25 goals for Everton, so he would get into my six ahead of people like Eric Dier and Alderweireld, who have been so solid for Spurs.
"Different players will have different criteria for who gets their vote - some current top-flight players I have spoken to have given it to the player who played the best against them, while when I had a vote I would have made my decision based on the games I watched too.
"In terms of a winner, it is hard to look beyond Leicester, and Mahrez and Vardy are one and two for me.
"Before Christmas, Vardy broke the Premier League record for scoring in consecutive games but, for eye-catching performances over the whole season, I would go with Mahrez."
Nevin: "Manchester United are where they are in the table because of David de Gea more than any other player and I suspect he will be their player of the year for a third straight year.
"Kane has answered all the people who doubted him and shown he is top quality but Mahrez gets my vote.
"As someone who played in his position it is obvious he could do things nobody else can do. In terms of his stats, his numbers are spectacular but what makes him so special and skilful is more technical than that - he has got a certain balance about him."
Lawro: "Kane did not score in any of Tottenham's first six league games of the season, but since then he has become a brute of a centre-forward and my star of the season.
"He scores every type of goal, from anywhere, and his size, skill, finishing ability, unselfishness and hard work make him stand out at international level too.
"The Leicester trio I have picked in my six are the best individuals in a very effective team unit.
"The front two have scored 35 goals between them - only Kane and Alli get close to that with 29.
"But I just think N'Golo Kante has been a revelation. It seemed to take a little while for everybody to realise what a good player he is.
"Kante has got great pace so he gets to people really quickly to break attacks down, then gets up the pitch too. Danny Drinkwater must love having him as his midfield partner."
"As far as the young player award goes, 19-year-old Dele Alli has to win it.
"He is the outstanding talent to break through in the Premier League this season, and with his attitude and application I think he will get better and better.
"I remember the first time I saw Riyad Mahrez play live, when I went to watch Swansea play Leicester at the King Power Stadium in April last year.
"He did not start the game and only came on in the 68th minute, but he was very influential when he did. I remember thinking 'wow, this guy is special'.
"Mahrez's feet are absolutely magnificent - he can score goals, has got great vision, can carry the ball and is a great athlete. He is the biggest reason Leicester are having such an outstanding season."


Legal action to prevent grammar streams from being set up within non-selective schools in England is being threatened by a teachers' union.

The National Union of Teachers says some academy trusts are advertising for pupils to join "grammar streams" within comprehensives using an ability test.
The NUT has written to Education Secretary Justine Greening threatening a judicial review.
The Department for Education says streaming by ability is allowed.
Multi-academy trusts are already able to stream by ability across their groups of schools and teach pupils at a separate site, says an education department spokeswoman.
And the education department says it is ready to investigate any breaches of the admissions code at these so far unidentified schools.
However the teachers' union says it has identified practices which are more than putting pupils in ability streams.
And the union says that any expansion of selection by ability remains unlawful, as laid down in the legislation introduced in 1998 which blocked the opening of new grammar schools.
Ms Greening has set out plans for a new generation of grammar schools, which would require legislation to overturn the ban on increasing selection.
But the Green Paper on grammars also raised the idea of academy trusts establishing a single centre for their most able pupils.
According to the NUT, a handful of academy trusts are already running grammar streams within schools which are otherwise comprehensive.
It argues this is an expansion of grammar school places by the back door.
It has sent solicitors' letters to the schools in question asking them to explain the practice.
Kevin Courtney, NUT general secretary, refused to name the schools, but said he was talking about something way beyond setting and streaming by ability, where children can go up and down between classes.
"There are schools that are advertising publicly that they are running a 'grammar stream' and running entry tests for it."
This, the NUT argues, is in breach of the admissions code.
"We are aware that the government is trying other routes other than primary legislation to increase the number grammar schools," said Mr Courtney.
"They're examining the possibility that one of your schools could be selective within a multi-academy trust, and saying this is just like streaming."
He added that the government had no manifesto mandate for grammar schools and that it was likely that any legislation would have a difficult passage through Parliament.
And he suggested ministers may be seeking a non-Parliamentary route for the expansion.
"We think that's illegal and we are investigating ways of challenging that."
Legal action could take the form of a judicial review of a school's decision to adopt and recruit for such a selective stream.
Or it may be a judicial review of any forthcoming guidance from the secretary of state to academy trusts allowing them to open separate grammar schools or streams within their group of schools.
Mr Courtney's letter to the education secretary says: "The existence of a separate establishment within the trust, for which pupils would be selected following admission to a school within the trust, would create a situation in which schools were seeking to frustrate the purpose of the law, which clearly sets out to prevent such selection."
The Department for Education says that multi-academy trusts can already stream by ability across their schools, with these ability groups being taught at different sites - and the consultation on grammars will not affect this.
A department spokeswoman said: "Streaming pupils by ability is, and has always been, allowed at all schools, and helps teachers give every child an appropriately stretching education.
"Multi-academy trusts have always been able to pool their resources to deliver these benefits on a larger scale and across different sites within the trust, and we want to see more do this."


A van driver and passers-by had an "unbelievably lucky escape" when a gas explosion tore apart his vehicle

Gas from a leaking cylinder in the back of the van exploded as the door was being opened, it is believed.
Witnesses described hearing "a large bang" which "rocked" nearby houses, just before 07:30 BST.
The man was taken to Bristol's Southmead Hospital "with minor injuries", said South West Ambulance Service.
The explosion woke people in homes in Linden Road and Cranbrook Road, in the Redland area of Bristol, and debris was spread for 30m around the site.
It is believed the driver was going away for a "rugby weekend" and had earlier loaded a gas barbeque into the van.
One woman who lives nearby, but did not want to be named, said the man was "one unbelievably lucky guy".
She said passers-by, including a cyclist, were "very shaken up".
An Avon Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said the circumstances surrounding the explosion "are not believed to be suspicious".


Serena Williams made herself ill after eating dog food hours before reaching the last eight of the Italian Open.

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The world number one tried "a spoonful" of food meant for her dog, Chip, before beating fellow American Christina McHale in straight sets in Rome.
"I thought 'what the heck, I'm gonna try a piece, it looks good'," she said.
"Fast forward two hours, I just ran to the toilet like I thought I was going to pass out. It did taste weird. It tasted kind of like house cleaner."
In a video posted on Snapchat, Williams explained she sampled a dish of salmon and rice offered on a 'doggy menu' at her hotel.
"I force-swallowed it, said the 34-year-old American. "I don't know what they put in these dog foods, but Chip liked it.
"I don't think it's consumable for humans. They should have wrote that! So now I feel really sick. It was just a spoonful, but I don't feel so good."
Williams defeated McHale 7-6 (9-7) 6-1 and set up a meeting with Svetlana Kuznetsova, who beat fellow Russian Daria Gavrilova, in the last eight.
Elsewhere, British number one Johanna Konta was beaten in three sets by Misaki Doi in the third round.
Konta, 24, took the opening set but went down 4-6 7-5 6-2 to her 25-year-old Japanese opponent.
Doi, ranked 45 in the world, belied her position 22 places below the Australian Open semi-finalist to take victory.
Doi faces Swiss Timea Bacsinszky in the last eight.
Despite her defeat, Konta will arrive at the French Open as a seeded player. A year on from being ranked 143rd in the world, she is up to 23.
"I thought she played a very, very good level today and I didn't do quite enough to get her out of her comfort zone," Konta told BBC Sport.


Prime Minister Theresa May met with US President Donald Trump yesterday just a week after he  started the top job.

She is the first leader from another country to visit Mr Trump.
The pair spent about an hour together at the White House discussing the relationship between the UK and America.
It was also confirmed that the new American president will be coming to visit the UK, later this year.
The two leaders appeared to get on well, with May praising him for his "stunning" election victory.
While President Trump called Brexit - the UK's decision to leave the European Union - a "wonderful thing" and claimed he had predicted it would happen.
They even held hands at one point as they walked across the White House lawn.
The pair talked about a trade deal - how the UK will buy and sell goods to the US after Brexit has happened - which is seen as important to the UK economy. Although Mr Trump spoke about a deal positively, nothing was confirmed.
Mr Trump also said that he 100% backed NATO.
NATO is an important international organization where the armies of various Western countries, including Britain and the United States, work together. It is seen by many people as important in helping keep peace around the world.
Getting America's backing for NATO is important for Theresa May.


The EU referendum is to move up a gear as groups hoping to front the official In and Out campaigns make their pitch to be allowed to spend up to £7m.

Britain Stronger in Europe says it has the backing of five political parties and David Cameron to make the case for the UK's continued EU membership.
Grassroots Out, which is vying with Vote Leave to lead the Out campaign, has Nigel Farage among its backers.
The Electoral Commission is expected to make a decision by 14 April.
The watchdog can select one designated lead campaign for both the "Leave" and "Remain" sides ahead of the referendum on EU membership on 23 June.
The chosen campaigns will get access to a grant of up to £600,000, an overall spending limit of £7m, campaign broadcasts, free mailshots and free access to meeting rooms.
It will judge each applicant's merits on the basis of a range of criteria, such as level of cross-party support, campaign tactics and organisational capacity.
Britain Stronger in Europe is expected to be the only group seeking the formal In designation.
In its submission, it says it has the support of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and three Northern Ireland parties - the Alliance Party, the Green Party and the SDLP.
Mr Cameron, who has become the overall figurehead of the In campaign, says he fully backs the application, saying it draws support from "every corner of the UK" and that its opponents are "divided into at least two camps who can't agree on very much".
While it backs staying in the EU, the SNP is running its own separate campaign in Scotland, while the Green Party of England and Wales has affiliated itself to Another World Is Possible - a different group formed by Labour MPs on the left of the party.
The Grassroots Out application will be submitted by Mr Farage and Tory MPs Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove. It says it has the support of Tory, Labour, UKIP and DUP politicians.
Vote Leave, which is vying with Grassroots Out, will submit its application at a later date.
It said key individuals backing Britain Stronger in Europe were past supporters of joining the euro while several organisations supporting the campaign group received EU funding.
Political parties and other groups can run their own campaigns but they will be limited to a spend of £700,000 if they register with the watchdog and will have to report the source of donations.
If they don't register with the Commission they will be limited to spending less than £10,000.


An 11,000-year-old Stone Age pendant discovered in North Yorkshire is to go on display at a museum in the county.

The piece of shale measures 31mm by 35mm and features a series of lines engraved on its surface.
The Yorkshire Museum, in York, claimed it was "the earliest known Mesolithic art in Britain."
The pendant was discovered during an archaeological dig at Star Carr, near Scarborough, in 2015.
It was studied by research teams from the Universities of York, Manchester and Chester.
Professor Nicky Milner, of the Department of Archaeology at York University, said it was possible the pendant was used for "spiritual personal protection".
"It was incredibly exciting to discover such a rare object. It is unlike anything we have found in Britain from this period," she said.
"We can only imagine who owned it, how they wore it and what the engravings actually meant to them.
"One possibility is that the pendant belonged to a shaman. Headdresses made out of red deer antlers found nearby in earlier excavations are thought to have been worn by shamans."
The exhibition runs until 5 May and will also feature other Star Carr finds including flints, a barbed point used for hunting or fishing and 11,000-year-old fire lighters.


American Hudson Swafford carded a final day 67 to seal his first PGA title with a one-shot victory at the CareerBuilder Challenge in La Quinta, California.

The 29-year-old world number 204 began two shots behind leader Adam Hadwin of Canada, but birdied three of the last four holes to finish on 20 under par.
Hadwin was one clear of the field after Saturday's round of 59, only the fourth on the PGA Tour on a par 72 course.
He followed it with four birdies and two bogeys in a 70 to finish runner-up.
Scotland's Martin Laird was the highest-placed European, tied for ninth place on 14 under.


The number of young men using steroids in London is rising on a "regular basis" a drugs charity has warned.

South Westminster Drug and Alcohol Service said an increasing number of young male clients were seeking support for anabolic steroid use.
Home Office figures show 60,000 people used steroids in the UK in 2014.
But the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said it was the "tip of the iceberg" and advised gyms to supply sharps bins for needles.
Roy Jones, from the South Westminster service, said: "Our numbers are increasing on a regular basis.
"I've been working with steroid users for 16 years and when I first started, the guys taking them were body builders in their 30s.
"Now the average age I see is 23."
According to Professor Gillian Leng, deputy chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), there is a worrying trend of young professionals turning to the drugs.
She said: "It's fair to say it is becoming a much more normal thing to do among some groups of young men who are concerned about the way they look...injecting steroids has become a solution."
Although government figures suggest 60,000 people used steroids in 2014, professional bodies believe the figure is much higher, as only those ending up in police custody are recorded in the statistics.
What are anabolic steroids?
Professor Leng said: "I think it is inevitable that the number is a lot higher.
"From the epidemiology (the data) we have about the kind of people who use steroids - it's a group that's not all going to appear in custody so that figure is bound to be the tip of the iceberg - it might be three times that number."
A 25-year-old, who works in the City of London and asked to remain anonymous, told BBC London he had taken steroids for two years.
He said he bought them from a dealer at his local gym and he knows many others who do the same.
"I started taking them because I felt I couldn't get any bigger training naturally," he said. "It was the next step for me."
"There's immense pressure to look good - it's part of the culture we live in, we all want that big figure."
Easygym have installed sharps bins in all their gyms, while Fitness First, Virgin Active and David Lloyd said some of their clubs also have them.
All the gyms said they had a zero tolerance approach to steroids and the bins were a health and safety measure for diabetic members and the disposal of razors.
The Department of Health said it had "given local areas the power and the funding to tackle public health issues like this".
Despite the increased awareness, Matthew Dear, 17, from Southend, died after an adverse reaction to steroids.
His mother Tina, who runs the Matthew Dear Foundation, which was set up to warn people about the dangers of steroid use, said: "When we lost Matthew six years ago, people thought it was a problem that wasn't going to boil over.
"We are now at that point where it is boiling over and somebody needs to take ownership."
Rolandas Malinauskas, from east London, is a natural bodybuilder - which means strictly no steroids.
The former British Champion said many young men did not consider the dangers of the drugs.
"In the long term, you do not win with steroids - they create a mirage," he said. "You can build muscle naturally but it takes time and dedication. Its all about precision, training and diet."


Budget airline Ryanair has confirmed it is to start flying from Glasgow Airport in October, with the launch of seven routes.

The airline is to continue operating from the publicly-owned Prestwick and has stressed its commitment to the struggling Ayrshire terminal.
But it said some destinations, including Dublin, would move from Prestwick to Glasgow.
Ryanair is also to launch a new Stansted service from Edinburgh.
The airline is the sole remaining scheduled passenger carrier at Prestwick, which was bought by the Scottish government for £1 last year.
It will continue to fly on seven routes from the Ayrshire airport over the winter months. Only about half of Prestwick's revenue is dependent on passenger traffic.
In a media conference on Thursday morning, Ryanair said it would operate 55 flights a week out of Glasgow from October as part of what it said was a £260m investment in Scotland.
It said it hoped to bring an additional 850,000 passengers through Glasgow International each year.
Ryanair's existing once daily flight from Glasgow Prestwick to Dublin will now switch to Glasgow as part of an expanded three times daily business service between Glasgow and Dublin.
Despite this switch, Ryanair said it "remains committed" to its long-standing base at Prestwick, where the airline has a major maintenance facility.
It said it was currently in discussions with Glasgow Prestwick and the Scottish government to explore growth opportunities to and from Prestwick.
Ryanair said its winter routes from Glasgow will be to Bydgoszcz, Derry, Riga, Warsaw Modlin and Wroclaw.
Winter routes from Prestwick will be to Alicante, Barcelona Girona, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Malaga and Tenerife.
Ryanair also announced three new daily business flights between Edinburgh and London Stansted.
There will also be a total of 16 winter routes from Edinburgh.
A Scottish government spokesman said: "We welcome Ryanair's further investment into Scotland, which will strengthen our connectivity and help all of our airports flourish, and we congratulate both Edinburgh and Glasgow on securing new routes.
"Whilst the number of routes from Glasgow Prestwick Airport is fewer than offered last winter, Ryanair has assured us of its continuing commitment to the airport and of its intention to actively consider growth options in the future.
"These service changes are part of the normal revision process that airlines undertake to optimise their business.  Ryanair has previously advised that changes to their schedule are due to a combination of factors, including a reduction in their aircraft fleet numbers.
"With the introduction of new aircraft in 2015, there is an opportunity for the team at the airport to make a strong business case for their use on Prestwick routes. We look forward to working with Ryanair, and other airlines, to improve the destinations on offer from Prestwick in the future."
The spokesman also echoed a call from Ryanair for the UK government to abolish Air Passenger Duty.
The Scottish government took Prestwick Airport into public hands late last year when its former owner Infratil earmarked it for closure.
At the time, it was said the airport supported 1,400 local jobs, was worth £60m to the Scottish economy and was considered too important to close by Scottish ministers.
In June, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced Prestwick was to receive nearly £10m of investment from the Scottish government.
The funding was to go towards operating costs, a repairs backlog and to make improvements to the terminal building.
Ms Sturgeon said a further £5.5m had already been provided since acquisition.
Responding to Ryanair's announcement, Scottish Labour's transport spokesman Mark Griffin said: "More flights for Glasgow are welcome but the removal of the last remaining Ryanair passenger service to Dublin from Prestwick airport is deeply worrying."
He added: "Over £15m of public money has been ploughed into the facility and we know that last year it was losing £1m each month.
"The Scottish government must come forward with a full business plan on how they intend to turn things around."
The Scottish Conservatives called for the airport to be returned to the private sector "at the earliest opportunity".
Transport spokesman Alex Johnstone said: "This is a disaster for the Scottish government, just weeks after boasting about how it had come to the airport's rescue.
"While investment at Scotland's two main airports is welcome, and proves the benefit of privately-owned airports like Glasgow and Edinburgh, the reduction at Prestwick is a blow."


A police officer has been disciplined over a mistake which led to armed police being sent to the wrong address during a search of a family home in County Down.

A man lodged a complaint with the Police Ombudsman's Office for NI after the incident last year.
He said he had been wrongfully arrested and that his home had been unlawfully searched.
The man said his wife was "hysterical" at finding police in the garden.
He was taken inside his house and arrested in connection with a firearms offence which had happened the previous day, before being taken into custody at a police station.
The man was later released when police realised he was not the person they were looking for.
When a Police Ombudsman investigator examined police files, he found that the issue lay with an incorrectly recorded date of birth in a handover information pack provided to the officer who organised the search.
The officer who compiled the pack had recorded the name and address of another man of the same name, but had mistakenly added the complainant's date of birth.
The officer who co-ordinated the search said she had checked the details in the handover pack, but found no-one of that name living at the address.
She then searched for a more up-to-date address using the complainant's name and date of birth, which resulted in his arrest and home being searched.
The officer who recorded the wrong date of birth admitted his mistake and "apologised to the complainant and his family for the upset and annoyance which resulted".
It said police "later tracked down the right man, who was subsequently arrested".
The Police Ombudsman investigator said "the mistake had unfortunate consequences for the man and his family".
They said they had "recommended that the officer should receive a disciplinary sanction, and that has since been imposed by the police".


Tranmere got their first win of the National League season in comfortable fashion against Woking.

After drawing their opening-day fixture at Torquay, goals from Andy Cook, Olly Norburn and Jay McEveley earned Rovers the three points.
Cook got the ball rolling in the 18th minute when he rounded the goalkeeper and slotted home and it was 2-0 just after the half-hour mark when Norburn fired in a low effort from 20 yards.
Woking gave themselves hope just before half-time when Charlie Carter headed home but McEveley's header from Jack Dunn's corner made the game safe for Micky Mellon's men.
Match report supplied by the Press Association.
Match ends, Tranmere Rovers 3, Woking 1.
Second Half ends, Tranmere Rovers 3, Woking 1.
Louis Ramsay (Woking) is shown the yellow card.
Substitution, Tranmere Rovers. James Alabi replaces Jack Dunn.
Substitution, Tranmere Rovers. Andy Mangan replaces Andy Cook.
Jamie Philpot (Woking) is shown the yellow card.
Substitution, Woking. Jamie Philpot replaces Charlie Carter.
Goal!  Tranmere Rovers 3, Woking 1. Jay McEveley (Tranmere Rovers).
Substitution, Woking. Kane Ferdinand replaces Chez Isaac.
Josh Staunton (Woking) is shown the yellow card.
Second Half begins Tranmere Rovers 2, Woking 1.
First Half ends, Tranmere Rovers 2, Woking 1.
Goal!  Tranmere Rovers 2, Woking 1. Charlie Carter (Woking).
Goal!  Tranmere Rovers 2, Woking 0. Ollie Norburn (Tranmere Rovers).
Goal!  Tranmere Rovers 1, Woking 0. Andy Cook (Tranmere Rovers).
First Half begins.
Lineups are announced and players are warming up.


A man arrested by police investigating the escape of a convicted murderer in Liverpool has been released.

Shaun Walmsley, 28, was getting into a cab with prison officers outside Aintree Hospital on Tuesday when he was sprung from custody by two armed men.
Merseyside Police arrested a 25-year-old man from Norris Green on Friday on suspicion of perverting the course of justice.
He has now been released pending further enquiries, police said.
A 27-year-old man and a woman, 26, who were arrested on Thursday on suspicion of assisting an offender were also released on Friday.
Walmsley is one of four men serving life sentences for the "vicious and savage" stabbing of Anthony Duffy in 2014.
Described as "highly dangerous", he was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 30 years.
The 28-year-old fled from outside Aintree University Hospital in a gold Volvo when two armed men ambushed the taxi after his appointment.
CCTV images were released showing the moment the armed men threatened prison officers.
Detectives said they were working with police forces across the UK and abroad to locate Walmsley, and appealed to members of the public for information.
Officers warned people not to approach the escapee as he, or those with him, may be armed.


The American space agency's New Horizons probe has returned further images of Pluto that include a view of the dwarf planet's strange icy plains.

A region, which has been named after the Soviet Sputnik satellite, displays a flat terrain broken up into polygons.
At the edges of these 20-30km-wide features are troughs filled with dark material and even small mounds.
Scientists say it could be evidence of the surface bulging due to gentle heating coming from below.
But it could just as easily be the result of some contraction process as materials vaporise into the atmosphere - not unlike how mud cracks form on Earth.
Science team members say they are trying not to jump to early conclusions in their interpretations - certainly, not until they get more data down from the spacecraft.
"When I first saw the image of Sputnik plain I decided I was going to call it 'not easy to explain terrain'," said Jeff Moore, who leads the geology, geophysics and imaging team on New Horizons.
At a media briefing at Nasa HQ in Washington DC, the mission team also showed a first picture of Nix, one of Pluto's smaller moons.
It is not particularly well resolved, being only about 15 pixels in the longest dimension. Nonetheless, researchers can now get a good sense of its shape and size (roughly 40km across).
"Let's set out expectations properly," said lead scientist Alan Stern. "As little as three months ago, we didn't have pictures of Pluto this good!"
Other measurements by the probe concern its observations of Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere, which models suggest it is probably losing at a rate of about 500 tonnes per hour. It is being stripped away by the stream of energetic, charged particles coming off the Sun.
Pluto's diminutive size (2,370km diameter) means it does not have the gravity to hang on to the atmosphere - in the same way that a bigger world like Earth or even Mars can - and it flows into space, forming a long ionised tail going in the same direction as all those solar wind particles. New Horizons has sent back some early data on this process.
By way of comparison, Mars loses only about one tonne of atmosphere per hour, explained Fran Bagenal, a co-investigator at the University of Colorado.
"What is the consequence of [Pluto's loss]?" she pondered. "If you add that loss up over the age of the Solar System, this is going to be equivalent to something on the order of 1,000-9,000ft - so that's a substantial mountain - of nitrogen ice that's been removed."
This is not enough to take away all of Pluto's atmosphere, but it is very likely to have effects at the surface where ices continue to vaporise.
Other fascinating observations include a concentration of carbon monoxide ice in the western sector of the light-coloured region on Pluto that looks like a heart; and also some surface streaks that appear similar to the kind of erosion or deposition marks you get behind an obstacle when it sits in the path of a persistent wind.
At the media conference, there was speculation that these streaks could also be plume deposits. However, the team stressed no active emissions from the surface, such as geysers, had yet been detected.
After its historic flyby on Tuesday, New Horizons continues to monitor the dwarf planet and its five satellites - Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
Even though it has gone more than three million km beyond the Pluto system, there is still much to learn by looking in "the rear-view mirror".
As it recedes ever further into the distance, New Horizons will be staring intently at the crescent edge of Pluto, to see if there are hazes and even clouds in its tenuous atmosphere.
It is also hunting for rings. It is possible that concentric circles of dusty, icy particles surround the dwarf.
Such rings would scatter sunlight in a way that might be easier to detect when looking from the "night side".
The probe has so far sent back only a tiny amount of its stored flyby data - just 2-3%.
The vast distance to Pluto (4.7 billion km) and the modest transmitter/antenna system (12 watts) onboard makes for very slow bit rates - an average of one kilobit per second.
This could be boosted by diverting power away from the inertial measurement unit that helps maintain New Horizons' stability.
And the team does plan to do this, spinning up the spacecraft to achieve a steady orientation instead.
However, the probe cannot spin and take images at the same time; and scientists are keen to observe Pluto for at least another two full rotations before making the change.
The final long-range picture is scheduled to be taken on 30 July, with the spin-up taking place a day later.
New Horizons will then send back all of its data - about 50 gigabits - in compressed form, starting in September, before repeating the downlink in an uncompressed form.
"To do everything in every form for all six objects in the system will take 16 months," said Prof Stern.
The BBC will be screening a special Sky At Night programme called Pluto Revealed on Monday 20 July, which will recap all the big moments from the New Horizons flyby.
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos


The SNP has returned the most councillors in Edinburgh

They now have 19 seats, just one ahead of the Conservatives who gained seven.
Labour slipped from first to third place in Edinburgh after losing eight seats to drop from 20 - actual seats - in 2012 to 12 this time.
All 17 wards have been declared with the SNP securing 19 seats, the Tories 18, Labour 12, Greens eight and Lib Dems six. The Greens gained one and the Lib Dems got three more councillors.
The council had been run by a Labour-SNP coalition.
Boundary changes have occurred since the last Scottish council elections so the BBC calculates overall seat changes based on notional 2012 results. They estimate what the results would have been in 2012 if the new boundaries had been in place.
A big casualty was the SNP's Richard Lewis, Edinburgh's culture convener, losing his Colinton/Fairmilehead seat.
Labour's Scott Arthur took the seat from the SNP in the constituency.
SNP group leader Frank Ross retained his seat in the Corstorphine/Murrayfield ward but Labour lost the seat of retiring council leader Andrew Burns in Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart.
Former Scotsman editor John McLellan has been elected as a Conservative councillor in the Craigentinny/Duddingston ward.
In total 63 councillors were elected to represent the City of Edinburgh Council, with a 50.5% turnout for the city - up from 42.6% in 2012.
By BBC Scotland political editor Brian Taylor
Let's talk numbers - there have been boundary changes which mean that some comparisons are made with "notional" outcomes in 2012, the last time these councils were contested.
On that count, the SNP are notionally down by a fractional seven seats. However, in terms of absolute numbers, the Nationalists have ended up with more councillors than in 2012.
Plus the SNP are the largest party in Scotland's four largest cities - including Glasgow, where jubilant supporters attended their ousting of Labour. They have waited decades for that.
Read more from Brian
Returning Officer Andrew Kerr said: "This is a particularly busy time for politics, both nationally and locally, so I'm pleased that so many people have turned out to have their say in Edinburgh - even more than the last local government election in 2012.
"Thanks to voters for taking the time to participate, demonstrating the  importance of local services to the public.
"I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our election team too, whose hard work and dedication has enabled the smooth-running of this election.
"I also want to congratulate all new and returning councillors, and welcome them to their role at the City of Edinburgh Council - I look forward to working with them in the years to come."
The SNP are now the biggest group on Edinburgh city council for the first time.
They've fallen some way short of a target of 25, but their win here is a symbol of the changes in Scottish politics - in 2003 not a single SNP councillor was elected.
Labour had been the biggest party here and falling into third place is a big defeat.
The Conservatives, as in other parts of the country, picked up votes in areas they haven't been strong in for some time.
Candidates who at the start of the day were pessimistic are now councillors.
The Lib Dems are delighted at their showing in the wards which make up Edinburgh West.
It's their key target at the general election and they made gains here. Elsewhere in the city their votes have been patchy, but sources say that's because their campaign has been focussed in the west.
The Greens had floated that they might win as many as 10 seats - but eight is a good result for them, adding two to their tally from 2012.
Negotiations for a coalition are likely to start today. The SNP have already ruled out a deal with the Conservatives - one source said they will be looking towards what they called a "progressive alliance".
Meanwhile, Labour remains the largest party in East Lothian despite the Conservatives gaining four seats.
Labour gained one to go to nine, the Tories went up to seven and the SNP slipped to six - down three.
Independents lost two seats.
East Lothian had been a Labour/Conservative coalition administration.
The Conservatives have gone from zero to five seats on Midlothian Council.
They are now just one behind the SNP, who dropped from eight to six, and two behind Labour, who went from eight to seven.
The Greens and independents both lost seats.
The previous administration had been run by the SNP, with the help of an independent.
The Conservatives have gone from one seat to seven on West Lothian Council.
The SNP have dropped two seats to 13, becoming the largest party, as Labour lost four seats and ended up with 12.
West Lothian had been a Labour minority administration.
The SNP has gained four seats to become the largest party on Fife Council as Labour lost 10 seats.
The Conservatives also made big gains, going up 12 seats from three to 15.
The SNP now has 29 seats and Labour 24.
The Lid Dems went down from 10 to seven and three independents lost their seats.
Fife had been a Labour minority administration.


While the 2013 Confederations Cup reaches the semi-finals stage in Brazil, on this day 10 years ago the tournament was struck by tragedy.

On 26 June 2003, Marc-Vivien Foe collapsed on the pitch while playing for Cameroon in their semi-final against Colombia and, despite attempts to resuscitate him, the 28-year-old died shortly after from a cardiac arrest.
A decade later, it is sad to learn that the memory of the former West Ham and Manchester City midfielder is beginning to fade in some quarters - and that an intended legacy is failing.
Ten years before his death, Foe had a dream of training young Cameroonians and African footballers.
He conceived the Marc-Vivien Foe Sport Complex, which was built on the outskirts of Yaoundé in Biteng.
It no longer reflects Marc's ambitions and hopes.
The statue at the entrance already has cracks, with the paint peeling off, and the building is falling into ruins. If nothing is done, one day it will be turned into a home for families to rent.
Today, the complex houses only a few people, the floor is dusty, there are no windows and doors, fungus is growing in some parts and the general atmosphere is one of abandonment.
Where there was supposed to be a swimming pool, there is a pool of dirty green water on which float a few rusty, dirty plastics and cans.
The playground behind is like many in Cameroon; hard ground, dug some years ago, and behind is a bush.
To stop thieves from removing the few things still left in the complex, Marc's father Sa Majeste Foe Amougou Martin has agreed to the installation of a police post.
"Marc would have constructed houses, he would have loved to help Cameroonians and Africans, but nobody has contributed to the project", he regrets.
Four years ago, there used to be a ceremony in memory of Marc at the complex with football matches played, but that is also a dying tradition.
This year, there is only a mass at the site of Marc's tomb to mark the anniversary of his passing.
A walk and a cycling race, some of the activities earmarked to commemorate Marc's life, have been postponed to 20-27 July due to the Gulf of Guinea Heads of State Maritime Summit.
There has been no official programme from the Cameroon government. Promises were made 10 years ago, but nothing has happened.
"Government is slow, it does not act fast and when promises are made like this, it takes time. I know something would be done but the government does not act fast," said a still-hopeful Amougou Foe.
"Ten years is like yesterday and we are still touched by Marc's death.  As a father it is difficult to forget."
He casts back his mind to when Marc signed a contract with Manchester City.
"Marc told me about the deal but I did not know he was sending me money. I had FCFA 80,000 (US$160) in my account, but when I checked the account I saw additional FCFA 60m (US$200,000) . I checked again at another counter to be sure I hadn't made a mistake."
Without the finances it is difficult to maintain the sport complex and Amougou Foe is deeply concerned.
"Marc's worry was he would not finish this complex," he said. He wished to train the youths, but this is not happening. If the family, despite our little means, had stopped trying to keep up the complex, it would have been surrounded by bush and forest; it would have completely fallen into ruins."
It seems Cameroonian footballers, too, have never thought of doing something as a group in honour of 'Marco", as he was fondly called.
Amougou Foe thinks Cameroonian footballers could do something if they so wished because some have sports complexes out of Cameroon.
"If there could be someone to construct the football pitch, take youths and train there, it would be nice; my wish is for the complex to be alive," he said.
Present in the stadium that fateful day 10 years ago was Cameroonian goalkeeper Idriss Carlos Kameni, who remembers how it all happened.
"Marc was tired three to four days before the game and I think he was old enough to know if to play or not. When he fell the game continued and we were only told afterwards he had died," he said.
It was difficult for us to bear, even returning to Saint Etienne where we were lodged, but, until we saw the body we did not believe he had died.
"I remember him positively as a great man and he was like an elder brother to me and others - he was the leader of the national team".
When Marc, who was a father of four, fell in the stadium it took some time for the medical team to arrive and attempt to revive him.
"Today, with current technology, there is a lot of swiftness in intervention and if his case came after others, he would have still been living", Kameni said.
"We lost a great man, he was always present, a reference for youths and always showed a good example."


A man has appeared in court in Wrexham charged with causing the death of a cyclist by dangerous driving.

Alan Cronin, 60, from Guilden Sutton, near Chester, died following a crash near Rossett flyover on the A483 Wrexham bypass last Thursday.
Polish national Damian Niepieklo, 22, has also been charged with failing to stop and failing to report an accident.
He was further remanded in custody until 26 June when the case will be heard at Mold Crown Court.
Mr Niepieklo spoke only to confirm his name and age, and to confirm he understood the charges.
There was no application for bail.
In a tribute on Friday, the family of Mr Cronin, a member of Chester Triathlon Club, described him as the "best possible dad, husband, brother and partner to have, willing to do anything for anyone".


Former Rangers midfielder Kyle Hutton has joined Dumbarton after being released by St Mirren.

The 26-year-old Hutton had been with the Sons' Championship rivals for a season but ended the campaign on loan to Airdrieonians in League One.
Hutton made 17 appearances for the Buddies but fell out of favour under new manager Jack Ross.
He then played 22 times as the Diamonds missed out on promotion after losing their play-off semi-final.
Hutton, a former Scotland Under-21 cap who started his career with Rangers, had loan spells with Partick Thistle and Dunfermline Athletic before joining Queen of the South prior to spending a season with St Mirren.
He becomes Dumbarton's second addition this week, with 20-year-old Hearts striker Ally Roy having joined on loan ahead of Tuesday's 3-1 League Cup defeat by Ayr United.
Roy, a product of Hearts' youth system, has had previous loan spells with East Stirlingshire and Stenhousemuir, scoring three goals in 30 appearances for the side relegated from League One last season.
He signed a new two-year contract at Tynecastle this summer and will initially be with Dumbarton until January.
Roy made his debut as a second-half substitute in the defeat by League One side Ayr.
Hutton could make his first appearance in the Sons' next Group E game, away to League Two outfit Clyde on Saturday.


Newport County have signed Huddersfield Town striker Flo Bojaj on loan until the end of the season.

The Exiles have also signed defender Mickey Demetriou on a free transfer.
"This is an important loan move for Flo and we're delighted that we've managed to arrange this spell at for him," Huddersfield's head of operations Stuart Webber said.
Newport have seen six players depart since 1 January, and have now signed eight, with more arrivals expected.
Defender Demetriou was previously with Shrewsbury but was released at the end of last season after suffering a knee injury.
The Exiles are five points adrift at the bottom of League Two and have lost eight successive matches.


Former St Helens second-row Joe Greenwood believes his move to Gold Coast Titans was one he had to make.

The 23-year-old has joined the NRL side after eight years with Saints, following the arrival of Zeb Taia.
"It was a hard decision to make but I have no tie-downs, no kids or house, it was an opportunity I could not turn down" he told BBC Radio Merseyside.
"It will be a long and tough season, but I'm looking forward to learning my trade under (coach) Neil Henry."
Greenwood's, whose contract was due to end at the conclusion of the 2017 season, said that a move had been in the offing for some time.
"I had some interest last year, but had a deal at Saints and I was happy. I wanted to cement my place, play on in Super League and gain experience," he said.
"A few clubs came in for me, we negotiated for a bit, and it started to appeal to me.
"It took me a couple of months to think what's best for me and my family, but this opportunity could be once in a lifetime and I have to take it with both hands."
A transition from Super League to the NRL can be a difficult one with some players failing to make the grade in Australia.
"It is a huge challenge," added Greenwood. "But I'm still young, and can only learn. I'm out of my comfort zone, I'll have to make friends."
"I'll always go down fighting though. The chance has come so soon, I could not say no and it puts me in for a call up for England.
"I'm going to miss Super League. It will always be there in my heart."


Children, described as the "forgotten victims of domestic violence", have been put at the centre of a Christmas campaign by the charity Refuge.

It said some 750,000 children witness domestic violence each year, which can have a "profound and lasting impact".
The charity has launched a video campaign on Facebook, encouraging viewers to raise funds and awareness by sharing the hashtag #givethemrefuge.
The launch comes as Refuge's specialist services face possible funding cuts.
One in four women in the UK experience domestic violence, and two women are killed each week by a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales, the charity said.
Refuge's video shows a girl unwrapping presents while being filmed by her sister, but the children end up abandoning their presents to run away from a violent argument between their parents.
An unnamed 22-year-old abuse victim said the fictional video was similar to her own childhood memories of living in "daily fear and terror" after witnessing her father "abuse, threaten and intimidate" her mother.
"It was only after a frantic phone call I had with my father that I knew he would fulfil his threat to 'smash her brains against the wall' and kill my mother," she said.
She eventually escaped to a refuge with her mother and brother, where they were supported by Refuge, she said.
"Not only did the refuge give us safety, anonymity and a place to overcome our trauma and rebuild our lives, but my brother and I had the opportunity to enjoy our childhood and also start over," she said.
Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, said more than 3,300 women and children were supported by the charity, with children making up about two-thirds of people in the charity's accommodation.
She added that the charity was "fighting to raise funds to keep its services running".


A woman in her 50s was killed when she was knocked down by a car in Greater Manchester on Friday night.

Police said she was hit at about 22:00 BST at the junction of Chester Road and Green Street in Stretford.
A 33-year-old man and a woman, 20, have been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: "A woman in her 50s was sadly pronounced dead at the scene. Next of kin have been informed."


Four West Midlands hospitals have become designated trauma centres making them the first port of call for people with life-threatening injuries.

Two centres are University Hospital in Coventry and University Hospital of North Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent.
Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham is another adult centre. Birmingham Children's Hospital also now has a consultant on site around the clock.
The centres will deal with multiple injuries and other complex emergencies.
An NHS spokesperson said they hoped to save a further 60 lives each year in the West Midlands by implementing the network of centres.
Seriously injured patients from Herefordshire and Worcestershire will be sent to Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham while those in Shropshire will be taken to the trauma centre in Stoke-on-Trent.
University Hospital in Coventry already deals with the most seriously injured patients in the city, Warwickshire and parts of Northamptonshire.
Dr Matthew Wyse, part of the major trauma service in Coventry, said the hospital had received "significant extra investment".
Dr Wyse said: "We've put the vast majority of that extra money into increased frontline staff to actually care for those patients.
"Our emergency department consultants will be on site receiving the most seriously injured patients 24 hours a day.
"We've got extra nurses on our trauma ward, extra radiologists who perform the trauma body scanning as soon as the patients come in and extra staff in the resuscitation room of the emergency department."
Dr Wyse admitted the Department of Health had recognised that "trauma care in general has lagged behind other countries" and he was not expecting too many more patients to be sent to Coventry.
"We see about 250 major trauma patients a year in Coventry and that figure will probably increase to 300 or so," he continued.


A woman has described the moment her mother was "flipped like a ragdoll" over a fence in a fatal attack by a herd of cattle in Northumberland.

Marian Clode was walking with her family on a public bridleway in Belford on 3 April when it happened.
The 61-year-old holidaymaker, from Greater Manchester, was treated at the scene, but died in hospital.
Daughter Lucy Rowe said one of the herd became aggressive, approached Mrs Clode and "repeatedly headbutted" her.
"It charged at her a third time with its head down and it lifted its head up and it flipped my mum like a ragdoll over the fence that she was stood up against and into the next field," she said
Her family said they wanted to warn others of the danger posed by aggressive cattle.
Mrs Clode was on holiday with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren.
They were walking along a public bridle path which runs through a farm from the National Trust site, St Cuthbert's Cave, when they were approached at speed by a herd of cattle.
Mrs Rowe's husband Kevin said: "We were probably doing everything we should have been doing.
"We had a guidebook, a map and were on a bridleway doing a walk we'd done before."
The family said they would be hiring a solicitor to represent them at the inquest.


Doctors and medical staff can use radio equipment from 2016 to improve quality of care for potentially injured players under new rugby league rule changes.

Mid-game concussion assessments and the need to react promptly to serious incidents has led to the decision.
Referees will also have powers to halt play if they have concussion concerns.
Teams already have a "free" temporary interchange of players which is not counted in their allocation if the player is then fit to return.
The Rugby Football League has also reduced video referee appointments to one per game.
Also included in the four new rule changes rolled out by the RFL is a clarification of the eight-point try law, which will now see the additional penalty kick goal awarded only for an challenge on a player "in the act of scoring a try".
Off-the-ball tackles on dummy runners or players not involved with play can still be dealt with by a referee but do not come under the eight-point try law.
The concern behind allowing medical staff to keep radio contact with physios on the field is the desire to avoid footballing messages being passed onto players.
To combat this, the equipment must operate on a different frequency not accessible to coaching staff, kit must be checked by match commissioners and the units must be marked with green tape.
These rules will be implemented at reserve-grade level to test their relevance and suitability in professional rugby league:


Work has finished on a new £15m emergency centre in Wrexham, combining fire and ambulance station services.

The building on Croesnewydd Road will replace the town's existing fire station and ambulance stations in Wrexham and Chirk. Staff are expected to move in next month.
The plans were mooted in 2012 and construction began in September 2014.
New staff have been recruited to clean ambulances after use so paramedics can spend more time with patients.


Police say they will be reviewing the case of a murdered teenager whose body has never been found.

Danielle Jones was last seen in June 2001. Stuart Campbell, 59, an uncle of the teenager, was jailed for life for her abduction and murder in 2002.
Following a potential new lead, Essex carried out a search at a garage area in Stifford Clays.
That search, which involved radar, excavation and a search dog, finished on Friday. Her body was not found.
Assistant Chief Constable Steve Worron said the force would be reviewing the case "to determine whether there are any other investigative avenues for us to take to continue our search for Danielle".
He defended the constabulary's decision to undertake the five-day search.
"I completely stand by my decision to search this area," he said. "Not to search would have meant there would always have been a question mark over whether Danielle's body could have been buried here.
"I cannot begin to imagine how difficult this week has been for Danielle's family.
"Our activity here has reopened old wounds and thrust them in to the media spotlight again, 16 years after Danielle's disappearance.
"Sadly, we have been unable to end the pain they have continued to experience and we are no closer to knowing where Danielle is.
"But we will continue to be there to support them as we have since Danielle went missing."


In December, just before India's busy literary festival season swung into full gear, over a hundred journalists across the central state of Chhattisgarh were gathering for another round of protests.

They were demonstrating against the arrests earlier in the year of two local journalists, Santosh Yadav and Somaru Nag, in cases they called "false".
They had been raising their voices ever since August, and with Delhi's journalists adding their support, the state government finally agreed to set up an independent committee that might look into cases such as this.
2015 had been one of the harshest years in memory for India's journalists, and for free speech in general - local-language newspapers, reporters and stringers had faced everything from defamation suits to threats and detentions, and worse.
Reporters Without Borders tracked the cases of nine journalists who had been murdered in 2015 - the most dangerous beats were environmental and political corruption. In Nagaland, newspapers blanked out their editorial spaces in November - an unprecedented gesture, as a protest against military directives that threatened to crush free reporting in the media.
The rot and the fear were not limited to journalism: 2015 was by any standards one of the worst years for free speech in India, with a sharp rise in defamation cases, sedition cases, majoritarian bullying and everywhere, an undercurrent of violence, a sense that mobs, or hired executioners, were never very far away.
In the middle of the year, writers across India had returned their state awards after the Karnataka scholar MM Kalburgi was shot by two unidentified attackers in his own home.
This gesture of conscience - spontaneous and unplanned - snowballed into a surprisingly large demonstration of solidarity as hundreds of academics, scientists, film stars and historians joined in the protest against intolerance.
At some cost: senior government ministers called the movement a "conspiracy", and the rightwing's army of trolls attempted to bully the writers, sometimes brazenly spreading lies about them.
It is impossible not to believe that 2016 will be a turning point for India and free expression in the subcontinent.
We could go under, losing more and more essential freedoms as writers, performers, environmentalists and citizens are caught in the crossfire of pressure from the state, as outspoken voices choke in the pollution caused by bad laws, or succumb to the rule of mobs, thugs and the deliberate violence unleashed by religious and political leaders.
Or we could see a steady fight wresting back these basic freedoms and demanding them as universal rights, not just rights for the relatively small world of India's English-speaking writers and journalists.
There is a wider sphere that connects the folk singer Kovan, arrested in November under sedition laws in Tamil Nadu for lampooning the government, with Huchangi Prasad, a young Dalit writer from Karnataka who had been beaten up in October and threatened for his writings on caste and religion, and the well-known writer Arundhati Roy, who faces a contempt of court case this month yet again over her reporting, on flimsy grounds.
2015 had seen a landslide of alarming and tragic events. But these past years in India had also seen an enormous and unsuspected appetite for books, a nascent fascination with authors, bestselling and otherwise.
The single biggest indicator of this was the profusion of literary festivals around the country - over 75 at last count, with the largest of them, the Jaipur Literature Festival, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands.
They could be spectacles with film stars, cricketing heroes and politicians grabbing the headlines rather than writers, but they were also increasingly one of the few spaces where writers in English and Hindi could meet authors and publishers whose medium was one of India's many other languages.
At the Hindu Lit For Life in Chennai, I had the chance to hear Kannan Sundaram speak.
Mr Sundaram is the publisher of Perumal Murugan, the writer who erased himself by announcing, "the death of the writer, Perumal Murugan".
He had been subjected to legal attacks, threatened, and in this deadly game of chess, where writer after writer was accused of provoking acts of organised violence, he had chosen to take himself and his books off the chessboard. Mr Sundaram spoke on the challenges in publishing, a subject on which he was, by any standards, an expert.
But on the drive to Jaipur, I was thinking about another incident, an apparently minor one in the present landscape of murders, thuggery, violent intimidation.
Just before the New Year, novelist and academic Saikat Majumdar had one of his short stories abruptly pulled from the Mint newspaper's end-of-the-year fiction special.
Majumdar got in touch with Delhi's nascent PEN chapter to ask if there was anything the group could do to help. The publication was within its rights not to carry his story, but the reason they gave sounded like self-censorship: their lawyers had said the story contained too much "violence of the words".
The magazine Caravan offered to print the story instead, with an explanatory note, and Majumdar's The Father of Man came out in its January issue.
The incident left a question mark hanging in the air: were we measuring sentences, now, for the violence of their words, and if so, what was the violence ration? What did editors consider an acceptable, under-the-radar amount of violence for words to bear?
The festivals felt, this year, somewhere between an escape from the violence that was bubbling up across the country along fault-lines of gender, caste, race and political allegiance, and something else, something more serious.
On the final day at Jaipur, I listened as Nirupama Dutt, the poet and biographer, shared her memories of the murder of Pash, the Punjabi poet, in 1988, another era of turbulent change.
I felt lucky to be on a session with Ashok Vajpeyi, Uday Prakash and CP Deval, to listen to them talk about what it meant to be a writer in a time of storms, how the writer's responsibility was not separate from his or her duty as a citizen.
In Jaipur, we spoke about the rise in defamation suits (48 filed in 2015), and what it meant for corporates and state governments to use this law to muzzle critics; about the contempt case against Arundhati Roy; about the rise in sedition cases (14 filed in 2015 against 35 respondents) making it a crime to question your country.
Roy's trials were bookended by the plight of other writers, journalists, environmentalists, that was how greatly the times had changed.
There are so many kinds of violence.
There is the violence of the word that people fear because it holds up a mirror to what is happening in India today; there is also the violence of not listening to the words of those who have borne the harshest brunt of censorship, of dismissing their struggles and trials without giving them equal weight.
Arundhati Roy is fighting a monstrous and unjust battle, but as people speak up for her, they must not erase the others who fight the same battle, too.


Five Australians have been killed in a road accident in India, amid reports they were members of a family on their way to the Taj Mahal.

The tyre burst on their SUV causing the vehicle to flip on Sunday, the Time of India reported.
Anamika Dutta, 45, her three children aged 12 to 20, and her sister, 25, were reportedly killed at the scene.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) confirmed only that five Australians were involved in a crash.
Ms Dutta's father NK Paliwal and her husband, Rupendra Dutta reportedly survived the crash and are being treated in hospital, reports said.


Lance Armstrong's deadline to appeal against charges from the United States Anti-Doping Agency has been extended.

The seven-time Tour de France winner was charged last month with using performance-enhancing drugs, and had until Saturday to contest or accept sanctions.
However, that deadline has now been extended by 30 days.
Armstrong, who could lose his Tour titles and faces a lifetime ban, denies the charges.
"This extension will allow the court sufficient time to evaluate Mr Armstrong's amended complaint," read a statement from Tim Herman, counsel to Armstrong.
The 40-year-old's initial 80-page complaint was thrown out on Monday, but he has submitted a shorter, 25-page suit asking a federal judge in Austin to prevent the case from going forward.
Three of the six men named in the doping conspiracy case were given lifetime bans on Tuesday.
Doctors Luis Garcia del Moral and Michele Ferrari, plus trainer Jose "Pepe" Marti, from the rider's US Postal Service team failed to answer charges before the USADA's deadline and were promptly banned.
Armstrong's latest lawsuit argues:
US District Judge Sam Sparks said the original lawsuit seemed more of an attempt to win over public opinion than to focus on legal argument.
"This court is not inclined to indulge Armstrong's desire for publicity … by sifting through 80 mostly unnecessary pages [for] factual material relevant to his claims," Sparks wrote on Monday.
USADA charged Armstrong with doping last month and claimed 10 of his former team-mates will testify against him.
Armstrong, who dominated the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005, has never tested positive and says he has taken more than 500 drug tests in his career.
In his original submission, he accused USADA, its chief executive Travis Tygart and FBI agent Jeff Novitzky of waging a personal vendetta.
Armstrong has already urged USADA's review board to dismiss allegations brought against him, claiming they are "stale allegations disproved long ago and short on evidence".
His legal team argue their client is unable to mount a legitimate defence until he is able to see the evidence against him, although USADA has said it is withholding witnesses' identities to protect them from intimidation.
Armstrong, who survived testicular cancer prior to his record-breaking Tour wins, retired after the 2005 race, but made a comeback in 2009. He retired for a second time in February 2011, taking up the triathlon.


A team of researchers from Ulster University (UU) will travel to the Himalayan mountains to study landslides early next year.

The project has been made possible by Â£50,000 of funding awarded to the group by the UK India Education and Research Initiative.
The focus of the research will be on landslide prediction.
A team from the university's Coleraine campus will travel to the Darjeeling region of India.
UU's Prof Gerard Parr, who will lead the research, said the study would focus on predicting massive landslides caused by extreme weather in remote mountainous areas.
He said: "Unfortunately, landslides have historically claimed many lives and damaged infrastructure."
The project is also supported by the Department for Employment and Learning.
The department's minister Stephen Farry said the process for securing funding for projects between UK and Indian universities was "very competitive".
"The department congratulates Ulster University on their success in securing this well-deserved award," he added.


Chile's Calbuco volcano has erupted for the third time in eight days, leading the government to order the evacuation of 2,500 people.

Some of those residents had only just returned to their homes after last week's eruptions.
The latest eruption was less powerful, but sent a large plume of dark grey smoke and ash rising from the crater.
Calbuco surprised residents of the Los Lagos region last week by bursting into life after decades of inactivity.
The National Geology and Mines Service issued a red alert after Thursday's eruption, warning that the volcano remained unstable.
On Friday, residents were warned that heavy rain could mix with ash and rock to produce deadly volcanic mudflows.
These "lahars" can slide down volcanoes like avalanches.
The BBC's Gideon Long in Santiago says that whereas the ash last week was blown in a north-easterly direction, this time it is drifting south-east over the town of Cochamo.
The town has been blanketed in a cloud of smoke and ash.
Calbuco is one of the most active volcanoes in Chile, having erupted in 1961 and 1972, and many times before that.
Last week's eruptions caused the cancellation of flights to and within Chile, and forced farmers in the area to evacuate their livestock.


Labour has called on the government to publish the full details of West Ham's deal to move into the Olympic Stadium "as a matter of urgency".

In a debate about the Olympic legacy, shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant highlighted the cost of the conversion and called it a "fiasco".
The cost of transforming the venue into a stadium ready for football has reached £272m.
Conservative MP and London Mayor Boris Johnson pointed the finger at Labour.
Of the £272m total transformation costs, £15m is being provided by West Ham United football club, who are occupying it from next season, with £1m coming from UK Athletics.
Mr Bryant told MPs the total spend on the venue would reach £700m, more per spectator than Wembley stadium, and more over budget than the total cost of converting the 2002 Commonwealth Games venue for use by Manchester City.
"This has the feel of a fiasco cooked up somewhere between the Mayor's Office, DCMS (Departure for Culture, Media and Sport) and the Treasury," he said.
"Which is why, in the interests of transparency, I urge the government to publish the full details of West Ham's secret deal as a matter of urgency."
Mr Johnson said "it was indeed" a mess that had been "cooked up", but said the former Labour mayor and then Labour government had been responsible.
"It was the Treasury under Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown who decided to go ahead with a stadium that was completely unsuitable for the purpose," he added.
Culture Secretary John Whittingdale said there were "good reasons" why full details of the arrangement with West Ham could not be published, saying things such as the terms of the rent should be confidential, as to publicise them could jeopardise future negotiations with possible tenants.
The parties also clashed over the sporting legacy left by the 2012 games, with Labour claiming participation had dropped in the following years in many parts of the country.
Mr Bryant accused the government of "an own goal, a dropped baton, a belly flop".
Mr Whittingdale criticised his "synthetic outrage" and said the London games had left an "amazing legacy".
"We were always clear that legacy was at the heart of our preparation" he said, saying strong progress had been made in terms of the regeneration of east London and increased sporting participation.


Detectives investigating the murder of a 34-year-old man at a pool party have renewed their appeal for information a year after his death.

Ricardo Hunter, also known as "Forty", was found dead in the garden of a house in Church Lane, Headley, in Surrey, at about 02:30 BST on 25 July 2016.
A post-mortem examination concluded he died from a gunshot wound.
Det Ch Insp Mike Ashcroft said: "We believe that some members of the community know who killed Ricardo."
He added: "You know if you were at the party and haven't come forward... we urge you to assist our investigation and help us get closure for the victim's family."
Mr Hunter, from Coulsdon in south London, was one of about 400 guests at the gathering, that was billed as a "Big Mansion Pool Party" at a "Posh Location in the Hills".
A reward of up to Â£10,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction is being offered.


Roman ruins described as a "once-in-a-lifetime find" have been discovered during work to rebuild a cricket pavilion in Carlisle.

The remains of a Roman Bath House were uncovered as part of work to move Carlisle Cricket Club's pavilion, which was damaged during Storm Desmond.
The site is thought to be about 1,600 years old and has already unearthed weapons, pottery and coins.
The find is close to the Hadrian's Wall World Heritage site.
Archaeologist Kevin Mounsey said some writing on one piece of carved stone referred to the wife of the Roman emperor Septimus Severus, who reigned from 193-211 AD.
He said: "We know that the emperor and his wife were staying in York at about that time.
"Inscriptions are always the best thing to find on site because it's written history and it tells us what was going on at a particular time."
Mr Mounsey said the discovery had come as a "complete surprise" to everyone.
He added: "The importance of this find is off-the-scale and I think it's of national significance.
"We're talking about a Roman bath house that belonged to the largest fort on Hadrian's Wall.
"We've also found stacks of terracotta tiles which would have formed part of the under-floor heating system that the baths used.
"To discover something like this is absolutely fantastic."
Carlisle City Council leader Colin Glover said: "If we can make this work for the city, this could do for Carlisle what the Jorvik Viking discoveries did for York.
"The archaeologists now need to analyse what they have found and we then need to work with the cricket club and potential funders to see where we go from here."
Carlisle Cricket Club said it would work with the archaeological team and the city council to preserve the site and look for an alternative location for its new pavilion.


"Moist" is the early front-runner in a search to find the most-hated word in the English language.

The distasteful adjective - a favourite of Great British Bake Off presenting duo Mel and Sue - has topped polls in the UK, US and Canada, according to those behind the global survey.
Oxford University Press said "no", "Brexit" and "British", joined moist as the UK's four most-despised words.
More than 10,000 people have responded to the survey so far.
"Moist" - dubbed by comedian Miranda Hart the "queen of all words" - also leads the way in the US, Canada and Australia, also coming second in the poll of Dutch opinion.
"No" is least popular in the early running in the Netherlands and Germany, while "love" and "sorry" find the least favour in India.
Dan Braddock, from Oxford University Press, said this was the first time Oxford Dictionaries - which focuses on current English usage - had tried such an experiment and "we're not entirely sure what to expect yet".
"We thought for a long time about the question to open with, but we decided to go down the negative route," he said.
"We thought people were more likely to have strong opinions about a negative subject matter."
He said the publisher hoped to collect 30,000 replies by the end of the project.
Despite the poll's findings, "moist" does not appear to be universally despised.
On Wednesday's edition of The Great British Bake Off, host Mel Giedroyc remarked that it was her "favourite word" as she urged contestants to produce a "sumptuous" drizzle cake.


A 16-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of arson after jumping from a window to escape a fire at a house.

The blaze broke out at the property in Darwen, Lancashire, shortly before 18:30 BST on Friday.
The teenager was taken to Royal Blackburn Hospital and treated for ankle injuries before being arrested.
No-one else was inside but it is thought a dog died in the fire, Lancashire Police said.
Det Insp Nick Hodgeson said: "It was fortunate that no-one else was injured and we are working with the fire service to establish exactly how the fire came to happen."


Jamie Walker was left out of his Hearts' squad against Dunfermline after "a little drop-off in his performance levels and his focus", Ian Cathro says.

The attacker, 24, is contracted until next summer and has been the subject of failed bids by Rangers this summer.
"Jamie's been under a lot of attention, a lot of speculation all linking him to one particular club," said boss Cathro.
"We'll support him but everyone has to do the right things and respond properly."
Walker started the earlier League Cup first-round group games against Elgin City, East Fife and Peterhead but Cathro decided not to include him against the Pars - a match Hearts needed to win to secure qualification to the next round but drew and then lost the resulting penalty shoot-out.
"It's been quite a difficult situation for him, which I think at first, he's managed to deal with well and of course we'll support him," Cathro told BBC Radio Scotland's Sportsound before Saturday's game.
"I love his talent, I love the way that he plays but I would say just now it's just starting to affect his focus and his performance levels with us a little bit.
"So, naturally, in situations like that there are some players who are more deserving of being with us today and they're more deserving of their starting place in the team.
"Jamie's a Hearts player, an incredibly talented one, one I enjoy working with and he just has to respond correctly and work his way back into the team.
"There's just been a drop-off, a little drop off in his performance levels and his focus, which just takes us below the level that he needs to be at - like everyone, like all of his team-mates need to be at in order to be part of our team."
Asked if he thought Walker would respond to being left out and stay at the club, Cathro replied: "100%. That's his responsibility.
"He's a Hearts player, he's a fans' favourite, he's a top talent, he's someone who knows how highly regarded he is by everyone in the club - myself being one of the loudest in giving praise to him."


Great bustards are "on the point" of becoming self sustainable in the UK for the first time in 185 years.

The world's heaviest flying bird was hunted to extinction in the country, with the last bustard shot in 1832.
Since 2004, the Great Bustard Group (GBG) has released hundreds of chicks on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.
David Waters, from the GBG, said if it was a "reasonable year" it would be the first "new great bustard population" to be established "anywhere in the world."
Over the past 13 years, a population of about 50 birds has been established from chicks brought in from Russia and Spain.
It is hoped that by 2019 the number of "release birds" will have reached 100.
"The birds have started to breed.  We had six nests last year and we'll have a theoretical maximum this year of 21 nests," said Mr Waters.
"And if we have a reasonable year - it will be first time a new great bustard population has been established anywhere in the world."
Mr Waters, who set up the GBG 19 years ago, said once the Wiltshire population was "self sustaining" the group would "stop bringing birds in".
"We'd like to increase it a little bit more to make it more secure but we're at that point where it's starting to happen on its own," he added.
An adult great bustard can be up to a metre (3ft) tall and weigh up to 44lb (20kg). Its wingspan can reach nearly eight feet (2.4m).
The bustard's size made it an easy target for hunters, leading to its extinction.


A 20-page dossier detailing a culture of bullying within the Conservative Party's youth wing was handed to party chairman Lord Feldman in 2010, according to a former activist.

The activist, who says he was himself a victim of bullying, told BBC Newsnight that the dossier was given by Ben Howlett, now an MP, to Lord Feldman.
Lord Feldman insists he was not aware of any complaints before August 2015.
Two activists involved in producing the document say it named Mark Clarke.
Mr Clarke is the volunteer organiser at the heart of the bullying scandal which has bedevilled the party since September.
He has been accused of bullying, sexually harassing and planning to blackmail other activists - allegations he has robustly denied.
Patrick Sullivan, who runs a Conservative think tank, said hard copies of the 2010 dossier were handed to Lord Feldman and Tory co-chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.
His testimony appears to contradict the account of Lord Feldman, a close friend and political ally of the prime minister.
The Tory chairman has maintained consistently that he was "wholly unaware" of the allegations against Mr Clarke until August 2015.
Mr Sullivan told Newsnight that Mr Howlett, MP for Bath, had decided to tackle widespread bullying within the party's young activists after being elected to a second term as chair of Conservative Future, the party's youth wing, in 2010.
Mr Sullivan said: "He had a strong anti-bullying stance in the campaign because there had been a culture of bullying. As soon as he was elected Ben [Howlett] and myself helped compile a dossier and that dossier was given by Ben to Lord Feldman and Sayeeda Warsi."
He said that complaints had been made to the party about Mr Clarke's behaviour even before 2010 when Mr Clarke was removed from the party's list of approved candidates.
"The dossier is not the only thing," Mr Sullivan said. "There were complaints about Mark Clarke in 2008. So complaints about Mark Clarke had been something that Conservative Central Office have known about for a very long time."
Mr Sullivan said his own bullying at the hand of Mr Clarke seriously damaged his health: "I got depressed. I felt I couldn't leave my home. I felt isolated." He said Mr Howlett had also been a victim of Mr Clarke's bullying.
They assembled the dossier over the course of a week along with a third activist. It contained first person accounts from activists who had been bullied, alongside newspaper reports of bullying incidents which were already in the public domain.
Mr Sullivan says he first challenged the culture of bullying in the party in 2008 after an 18 year-old woman was "spectacularly" bullied in the run up to a Conservative Future election.
He said: "Mark Clarke had a preferred candidate and as a result he started bullying and intimidating people who were opposing that candidate. That was when I first realised how bad he was."
Mr Sullivan said he made a speech inside CCHQ attacking the bullying culture in front of Mr Clarke and others. "As a punishment for making that speech I was isolated like a pariah," he said.
More on this story:
Memo warned Tory bully 'dangerous'
Ministers pull out of conference amid bullying scandal
Grant Shapps quits amid Tory bullying claims
Lord Feldman: The key questions
Listen: Mark Clarke profile for Radio 4
Tory 'bully' was backed by party bosses
Tories 'failed to act' on 'institutionalised bullying'
Watch: Newsnight investigation into Tory bullying allegations
Mr Howlett had previously told Newsnight that "Feldman has known about Clarke for a long time" but declined to discuss the contents of the dossier.
Two of the document's authors said it named Mr Clarke among a number of alleged bullies involved with the party's youth wing.
Mr Sullivan said Baroness Warsi had been "very vigilant in regard to bullying" but that tolerance of bullying had increased after she left Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) in 2012.
The bullying scandal has gathered pace since a young activist, Elliott Johnson, took his own life in September. Elliott Johnson had previously complained to CCHQ that he had been bullied by Mr Clarke, and named Mr Clarke in a letter left to his parents.
Mr Clarke has denied all allegations of inappropriate behaviour. He has told Newsnight he was not aware of any "dossier" mentioning him in 2010.
On Tuesday night Elliott's father Ray told Newsnight: "If Lord Feldman and CCHQ were fully aware of allegations of bullying being made as long ago as five years and they didn't act upon it, then it just confirms my view that they really should have taken action against bullies in the first place and failed to do so."
"They failed to protect my son and they failed to protect many other young activists and they should stand up and take responsibility for it."
Former co-chairman Grant Shapps resigned last month as a development minister after it emerged that he had given Mr Clarke a formal role in CCHQ despite previous concerns about his behaviour.
However both Number 10 and the party have been determined to protect Lord Feldman who has been a member of the prime minister's inner circle since they met at Oxford.
Increasingly, however, Lord Feldman has come under pressure, both over his account of when he first became aware of allegations of bullying, and over whether he reacted appropriately to a slew of complaints received in August of this year.
Last week Newsnight revealed a former CCHQ worker submitted a memo to a senior party official in August claiming that Mr Clarke was "sociopathic" and "dangerous" and warning that there could be "devastating" consequences if he was not kept away from the party's youth wing.
Asked whether he believed Lord Feldman should have done more in response to the memo, Mr Sullivan said: "Yes I do, I think it was quite shocking that Mark Clarke was able to continue with his RoadTrip 2020 whilst this investigation was process."
Lord Feldman said on Tuesday night: "I was wholly unaware of allegations of bullying and inappropriate sexual conduct by Mr Clarke prior to August 2015. Such behaviour is abhorrent to me and had this been brought to my attention I would have taken immediate action to investigate, as I have done since I received the complaint in August 2015."
More on this story on BBC Newsnight at 22:30 GMT on Tuesday 8 December on BBC Two. You can catch up afterwards on iPlayer and follow Newsnight on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube


An extra £11.85m will be spent on improving Powys' highways over the next three years, the council has said.

However, there are still "significant challenges ahead" according to cabinet member John Brunt.
He said the council has a maintenance backlog of £57m for its roads.
Mr Brunt added: "Despite this latest additional investment the overall road conditions will still deteriorate but at a reduced rate."
The local authority's capital investment strategy for three years from 2017-18 was agreed in February, with the council announcing on Wednesday that £11.85m would be earmarked for roads.


Japan will know this weekend whether they have upset the Rugby World Cup odds once again, and qualified for the quarter-finals for the first time.

However, even if that proves a step too far for the Brave Blossoms, they have already made history with the greatest upset at a Rugby World Cup - their stunning victory over 1995 and 2007 champions South Africa.
The Asian underdogs' results since then may not have matched that peak, but rugby union in the country is now on a popular high, and there is a new appetite and interest in the game that bodes well for Japan's hosting of the competition in 2019.
What has been a niche interest has found itself catapulted into the national consciousness, while last week global governing body World Rugby approved a revised tournament plan for 2019, one brought about by issues over where the final would be played in four years' time.
After delays around building a new Olympic Stadium for 2020, which Japan is also hosting, World Rugby has said the 70,000-seat Yokohama Stadium (venue for the 2002 football World Cup final) will host the final of the 2019 rugby competition.
One Japanese business expert, and keen amateur rugby player, believes that the tournament, the first ever to be played in Asia, will provide breakthrough moments for both the sport and the nation.
"In Japan, rugby is not really fully recognised," says Seijiro Takeshita, professor of management and information at the University of Shizuoka, and former captain of the London Japanese Rugby Football Club.
"It is also a pretty difficult game to understand, so I think more recognition of the game would definitely boost the population of people who are going to look into the game. Once they do, they will get hooked."
There was an immediate upturn of interest after the South Africa victory, with nearly 20 million Japanese watching the team's second Rugby World Cup match against Scotland, their first following the stunning upset.
The Scotland match started at 22:15 Japan time and 19.5 million people, some 15% of the population, stayed up to watch.
"I think [the South Africa victory] had an astonishing mega-effect, both outside and in Japan," says Prof Takeshita. "That showed to the world that we can do this. Right now nobody argues that Japan will be hosting the World Cup in 2019."
Prof Takeshita says Japan has already eyed increased tourism as a major target for the economy and that the 2019 World Cup can "certainly give a very strong following wind to that trend, and also recognition that Japan could hold such a big event".
"It would also be a very big advertisement [for Japan] to the rest of the world, so it works very nicely inside and outside of Japan, and I do feel that Japan will make a very good host," he adds.
"Japan is known for its articulate and precise level of, for example, transportation, service, what have you... it is a very business-like community, and I think it a very good opportunity to show to the world that we can do this really, really well.
"It is also an opportunity for Japan to appeal to the world, that this isn't just business, but this is a wonderful place for leisure as well, and you can mix both of them together."
He said that Japan was still not "fully understood" by the rest of the world. "I think this is a very good opportunity for Japan to show that it is not only on the operations side that we can do it, but that the country is a very strong attraction for you to come back to many times later on."
Koji Tokumasu is general manager of the Japan 2019 Rugby World Cup Organising Committee and has been a fan of rugby since he fell in love with the game while studying in Cardiff.
He sees the 2019 World Cup expanding the Japanese rugby participation base - currently focussed on colleges and corporate-affiliated teams - out into the wider sporting public.
He says the host cities will be key in promoting the game, through their schools, civic events, and local government support.
"We are making use of about 20,000 primary schools, and bringing tag [touch] rugby, non-tackling, which the boys and girls can enjoy," he adds. "So by the year 2019, every single child will have touched the ball."
He also said that whereas the 2020 Olympic Games would be held in one city - Tokyo, the Rugby World Cup could bring economic benefits to a number of cities and towns across Japan.
He said as well as the 12 host cities, there would be another 20 training camps, meaning tourist visitors would be visiting a number of communities during the six-week event.
And Mr Tokumasu says that despite the stadium hiccups, the country will deliver a successful Rugby World Cup.
"Of course Japan Rugby is confident to deliver a successful World Cup," he says. "The reason why World Rugby has given us an opportunity to host the World Cup is that rugby should be played outside the traditional unions, such as England, Australia, and South Africa.
"Whenever you have a major event you always have some issues in between, from the beginning to the end... and in the end we [will] just look back and say 'sometimes we had such an issue, but let's enjoy the tournament'."
He adds: "Asia has 60% of the world population, and we really want to make sure the Rugby World Cup in Japan 2019 will contribute to the develop of rugby in Asia, and eventually into the world.
"We have a special mission to make rugby a truly global sport, and that was the very reason we were chosen to host.  And we are going to complete our mission."
Read more about the Business of Rugby here.


The Workers' Party has attacked the major parties in Northern Ireland for seeking to turn the general election into "another sectarian headcount" based on Brexit and the Irish border.

In its manifesto, the party says the election should be about what really matters to people.
It urges the construction of a socialist society.
The party, which is fielding two candidates in the election, headlines its manifesto as What Really Matters.
The manifesto, which is published online, calls for:
"This election has been dominated by talk of pacts, inter-party deals and paper candidates," says the party.
"But for working class people - employed, unemployed, young people and pensioners - there are very real, pressing and systemic problems to be faced.
"The major parties have sought to slug out yet another sectarian headcount, this time based on Brexit and the border.
"The reality is that it is about neither."