The Six Nations player of the tournament voting is open, and a bit strange

You can get in and vote for the official Player of the Six Nations now, but the criteria for selection is a little odd to say the least.

In the spirit of interactivity, fan engagement and all that other good stuff the folks over on the RBS Six Nations official site have launched the poll for the Player of the Tournament.

Fifteen men are up for selection and while most, and we stress most, are good selections, some are very odd. Others deserve to be there, but the reason cited by the site for inclusion is bizarre too.

Take Owen Farrell, who had a great start to the Championship for England before fading near the end. He deserves to be in the top 15 players but the reason cited by the folks on the RBS site is ‘Was the most talked about player across social media’.

Yes the RBS decided to use social media interactions to select him in a bid to have a fan element to the list. That most of those mentions may have been slagging him about his hair, or his berating of refs, doesn’t come into it.

Here's the wording on the site, explaining the system used.

This year supporters have had more of a say than ever before because the shortlist is compiled through technical statistics, and crucially, fan opinion. With the help of Accenture - RBS have created an algorithm which gives every player a score based on match statistics and social listening online. According to match statistics and fan opinion, these are the best performing players.

That brings us to Mathieu Bastareaud. The French winger, who started just three games for France, gets in based on having 100 per cent pass completion. Conor Murray is in because he completed 262 passes while Dan Biggar gets in because he made 97 per cent of his passes and kicked one of only three drop goals in the Championship. BOD gets in for his stat of never being turned over in the Championship.

Players like Sean O’Brien, arguably Ireland’s best player of the campaign, doesn’t get in. Neither does Jim Hamilton for Scotland while Mike Phillips gets in for champs Wales but none of their powerhouse trio of Sam Warburton, Justin Tipuric or Toby Faletau does.

It’s a total head scratcher but if you fancy casting your vote, just click here. It closes on midnight March 20. Surely we can drum up a few extra votes for BOD...