Peter Jackson: Why it may pay to keep faith with Vunipolas
One had been scheduled to start his weekend on the Lions bench in Brisbane, the other on a similar bench in the Andean city of Salta late last night for England‘s opening Test against Argentina.
Instead of holding Mako in reserve, the Lions took him off the leash as a late replacement for the injured Gethin Jenkins. So the Vunipola brothers are making their presence felt in a way their parents could never have imagined.
“I pray for them,” their mother, the Reverend Vunipola, said on the eve of a potentially momentous weekend. “And I make sure they know this is all God’s doing and that’s why they also pray.”
It would be perfectly understandable for the block-busting Vunipolas to seek safe deliverance not just for themselves but for those saddled with the hazardous job of stopping them – a pair of God-fearing brothers capable of putting the fear of God into anyone standing in their way.
Mako, the older brother of 22, won his England cap seven months ago and Billy was within reach of winning his sometime shortly before midnight.
To say they have blazed a trail is an understatement and no surprise to those following the swathes they cut through age-group rugby. Within the family, the only surprise was not that the brothers’ trail took off but the direction it took.
Fe’ao Vunipola wanted them to play for Wales. An international in his own right, he left Tonga at the age of 29 to finish his career at Pontypool in what was then the Welsh Premiership. His wife, Singa, and the children arrived the following year.
“My husband did want them to play for Wales,” said Singa who is also chaplain to the Tongan community in Britain. “Pontypool was where the boys started playing. There was always the worry that they would be injured because that is part and parcel of a game like rugby.
“We discouraged them in the early days. We wanted them to concentrate on their education but being part of a passionate, rugby-loving family meant the game was always going to be a big part of their lives.
“At first we never intended to stay but after returning to Tonga in 2001 we realised that God wanted us to come back to Britain. I was very much involved with Methodist churches in Pontypool and
Pontnewynydd and we stayed in Wales until 2004.”
Singa’s training for the ministry took her initially to Cardiff and then Bristol at which point the family moved across the Bridge. “That was where the boys really took off, in junior rugby in Bristol,” she said.
“Their father asked them both to consider playing for Wales but by then they were very much into English rugby.”
Each won rugby scholarships to public schools, Mako to Millfield, Billy to Harrow. Wales ought not to think of what might have been but thank their lucky stars that another of Welsh rugby’s Tongan imports during the late Nineties, Kuli Faletau, stayed in his adopted valley.
His son, Toby, went through the ranks from school rugby in Pontypool all the way to the Lions without any cross-border offers to distract him. For all their father’s espousal of the Welsh cause, the Vunipolas were the ones who got away.
Mako, born in Wellington and therefore eligible for New Zealand, made a predictably shuddering impact on the Lions tour as a first-half replacement for Ireland prop Cian Healy during the midweek romp in Perth over the Western non-Force.
Billy, born in Sydney and therefore eligible for Australia, responded with a simultaneous achievement of his own. He marked his arrival in the England back row for the non-Test fixture against a South American XV in Montevideo with something spectacular even by his family’s standards – a hat-trick of tries all dotted down in a matter of six minutes.
While his sons were busy reaching major landmarks on different continents, Fe’ao, a quantity surveyor by profession, was also overseas on rugby business. A former national captain, he spent the week in Chile preparing Tonga’s next generation for an U20 international tournament.
Vunipola Snr also scouts for Saracens where, from next season, his sons will be in the front and back rows of the Fez Heads’ pack, Billy having left Wasps last month. Wales would have loved just one of them.
