Case of mistaken identity: When @rvp is not Man United star Robin van Persie
Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad uses @rvp as his Twitter handle. Says it is a nuisance that people confuse him for Manchester United's Robin van Persie and flood his account
- NDTVSports
- Updated: April 25, 2013 06:07 PM IST
RVP received a barrage of congratulatory tweets wishing him after Manchester United claimed its 20th EPL title on Monday. The only catch in these messages was that it did not reach the Dutch striker but an Indian IT consultant - Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, who just happened to have the same initials as Robin van Persie!
Van Persie scored a hat-trick against Aston Villa to earn rave reviews with even manager Alex Ferguson hailing the performance. Passionate fans of the club took to Twitter, wishing what they thought was their superstar. It was instead, Prasad - a Delhi based software consultant - who was caught unawares by the deluge of messages, all because of his Twitter handle: @rvp.
According to a report in BBC, Prasad received over 10,000 messages which were actually intended for the soccer star whose official Twitter handle is Persie_Official. The 52-year-old was quick to announce that he was not the player and tweeted: RVP is the account of Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad, a telecom & infotech consultant in India. RVP is NOT the account of Robin van Persie.
While many are seeing the light side of the whole confusion, Prasad himself though is quite hassled by the whole 'ordeal'. "I'm a fan of Robin van Persie, so I understand people wanting to congratulate him, and most of the messages or mentions are nice. But it's a real nuisance for me. I keep having to tell everyone I'm not Robin van Persie and blocking unwanted followers," he was quoted as saying. After all, he spent close to ten hours blocking followers on the micro-blogging site after the match, people who thought he was the 29-year-old player, close to 5000 in number!