Peter Jackson’s column: Leigh Halfpenny’s £5 note has been repaid with interest

Leigh Halfpenny won his first goalkicking prize from the most acute of angles at the age of ten – a £5 note. Rob Steele, the embryonic superstar’s first coach at Gorseinon Rugby Club, tells the story of how he deliberately chose the most difficult place on the Welfare Ground and challenged the U11 minis to have a go.
“You are not going to believe this but this is what happened,” he said. “As a bit of a laugh after the last training session of that season, I made a mark five metres from the goal line and five metres from touch and said to the boys, ‘I’ll give a fiver to anyone who can put it over from there’.
“The angle allowed for no more than a five-degree margin of error, tricky enough for established professionals never mind ten-year-old kids. Imagine my reaction when three of them nailed it with a perfect kick – Aled Price and my son Calum. Needless to say, Leigh was the other.”
At Twickenham on Saturday, Leigh will earn rather more than a fiver for the privilege of taking Toulon‘s shot at history. Whatever happens, the most dependable full-back in the game will witness something that has not been witnessed before.
Toulon will either complete the first hat-trick of consecutive titles or Clermont Auvergne will no longer be the best team not to have won Europe’s supreme trophy. Rob Steele will be there.
“Sometimes I look at Leigh’s face and think of the time when I first saw him play rugby, at the age of six,” said Steele, who runs his own building business in Gorseinon. “Then I think of him as he is now, a superstar. You never think you’re going to be so close to a superstar. It’s a strange feeling.
“When he joined the minis at six we weren’t allowed to play him because the WRU insurance didn’t cover six-year-olds. You knew instinctively that he was different, right from the very first game, Penlan at home – ten minutes each way.
‘’I remember thinking, ‘oh my God, we have something special here’. He had real speed.
“He was a natural. With the beginners, they just go onto the field and play. There are no set positions.
“The better the competition, the better Leigh played. He combined rugby with football until the year before he could start schoolboy rugby at 11 and we were all afraid he was going to stick with football.
“He had a big boot right from the beginning. In the early days the boys concentrated on running and handling.
“The only kicking they did was for goal. All 15 wanted a go so everyone took it in turn. You’d get parents on the phone asking why their boy wasn’t getting more of a go but Leigh was such a natural kicker. The boys all wanted to win and they realised soon enough that they had a better chance if Leigh was kicking. There wasn’t any argument about it.”
Halfpenny has never been slow to acknowledge the debt he owes to his grandfather, Malcolm, for instilling into him a goalkicker’s disciplined mentality from an early age, and to Steele.
“Without them and others, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he said. “I was lucky to have a fantastic coach in Rob Steele and grandad was the one who taught me kicking.
“When I started, I missed all the time. I was hopeless.”
Such is his accuracy now that one miss causes a stir for the player whose kicking coaches – Jonny Wilkinson at Toulon and Neil Jenkins with Wales – were masters of their craft.
Halfpenny’s capacity to work on his place-kicking has prompted Wilkinson, the prototype workaholic, to intervene.
“I’m just there to watch and monitor, to make sure Leigh saves some energy for the game because he works so hard,” said Wilkinson of the Welsh Lion who stepped belatedly into his boots after missing the first two months of the season.
“He deserves to be that good.”
He will need to be against Clermont who believe their time has come.
But then the Michelin Men thought their time had come in the Dublin final two years ago against the same opposition when the better team ended up with nothing.