Freddie Burns, the Bath fly-half, has revealed how his family came together to track down and identify an anonymous troll following weeks of reportedly being abused on Twitter.

Pat Bunton is claimed to have sent a high number of tweets harassing Burns after a number of Bath matches at the start of the year, posting under the handle ‘havingalaugh3’.

The tweets described a performance from Burns as “rudderless”, claimed he gloated about earnings and said his team-mates and club staff disliked and distrusted him. They also said he was a selfish player and claimed that Bath initially rejected him.

Burns and Bunton, it transpired, are both connected to the Oldfield Old Boys amateur club. Burns and his brother Billy, now at Gloucester, played for the club as juniors, while Bunton succeeded Burns’s father Jeremy as chairman.

“I finished a Friday night game and had about 15 to 20 tweets from the same account,” Burns told The Daily Telegraph. “But the issue was we could tell it was someone who was relatively close to home, because the stuff he was tweeting … it’s pathetic.

“For example, he posted that I had dyed my hair and added the hashtag #PrimaDonna, with the ‘Donna’ part capitalised because that is my mother’s name. We have a very protective family.