In the early 2000s, a small group of Tongan international rugby players from Great Britain held regular community gatherings to share impossibly large meals, pray and socialize together. Fe’ao Vunipola, Kuli Faletau and Keni Fisilau all came from the same club at home and over the years their respective wives and children effectively became one big family.
To say that the England and Wales national teams, along with the British and Irish Lions, have derived some benefit from this overflowing house of Tongan expats would be the most colossal understatement. Between them, Fe’ao’s sons Mako and Billy Vunipola earned 154 caps for England, while Kuli’s son, Taulupe Faletau, played 104 times for Wales. Now it’s time to meet the Fisilaus in the form of Keni’s 20-year-old son Greg, the back row who made his England A debut in February and will start on the bench for Exeter against Bath in the Champions Cup last 16 on Saturday.
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Considering Greg’s relative inexperience, his progress since arriving in Exeter from Wasps just seventeen months ago has been remarkable. “It’s unbelievable to think he’s only 20,” Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter said. “Physically he has only scratched the surface. He doesn’t look that big and then he steps on the scale and he weighs 110kg.” There is yet more turbocharged Tongan power to emerge in the eyes of the Chiefs’ strength and conditioning staff.
That said, if you talk to Keni, his hard-working, attractive eldest son could soon have some serious family competition. Anyone walking around the Oxford area this week may have already spotted a 10-year-old doing hill sprints, and the boy’s name is another giveaway. “We call him ‘MB’, but his name is Makobilly,” Keni proudly reveals. “We gave Mako and Billy’s mother the honor of naming our little one and she named him after her boys.” Okay, so what’s the latest from the hill? “Yesterday, when I was away taking my middle son to Warwick, I told him to go and do fifteen runs himself. When I got back, I asked how many he had managed to get. He said 10.”
If you’re starting to wonder whether 47-year-old Keni, once a tough center for Plymouth Albion, is a fan of tough love, you’re right. In Greg’s case, it started before he could walk – “When he started growing, I just tried to get him to crawl up and down the stairs” – although Keni ruefully admits that at times he almost went too far. “When Greg was young, he turned purple every time he went for a run, but he never stopped. He cried, but continued anyway. It wasn’t until later that I found out he had asthma. I thought, ‘Oh no, I almost killed him.’”
Legend has it that Keni initially refused to take Plymouth-born Greg to rugby due to the lack of contact, although the truth is more nuanced. ‘We went to church on Sundays so I didn’t take him to mini-rugby.’ However, nature eventually took its course and Greg started playing for Devonport Services and then Oxford Harlequins when his father became a player-coach there. “We are Tongan,” says Keni. “Rugby is in our blood from home. I have two older daughters, but I kept praying for a son. And then he came!”
The Fisilau siblings have always been encouraged to make their mark in some way. The eldest sibling, Lisia, is in the RAF and her sister, Malieta, has a degree in business administration and law. A teenage brother, David, is at the RFU’s Midlands academy and then there is Makobilly, who has recently been awarded a scholarship to a leading local preparatory school.
It’s quite a success story considering the visa problems that almost forced Keni to leave Britain before Graham Dawe, his former coach at Plymouth Albion, intervened on his behalf. In return, Keni and his wife Camilla gave the former Bath and England hooker the honor of choosing their first son’s name. Twenty years later, Greg’s respect for his parents is also deep-rooted. ‘Dad is a very hard man. He taught us all very well to stay humble and work as hard as we can. He and Mom pushed us all from a young age to reach the potential we couldn’t see at the time. I’m glad they did. When you get older and look back, you’ll understand why. I am grateful to have such parents.”
The next collective goal is for Greg to progress to a full England cap – “It’s always in the back of everyone’s mind to be able to represent his country at the highest level” – or at least tour Japan and New Zealand this summer. Fisilau Jr. hasn’t always been a nutritionist’s dream – “I used to follow the old ‘seafood’ diet: see food and eat it,” he says – but his deceptively strong ball control and work rate are now his calling cards.
He has certainly recovered very well from the shock – “I’d almost say it was quite traumatic” – of his first professional club Wasps collapsing, followed by a daunting Premier League debut for Exeter against a loaded Saracens team with both seniors Vunipolas. “I wasn’t supposed to play, but I got thrown in a few days before. I remember standing there waiting for them to kick off and physically shaking.”
However, there were few obvious nerves as he and Exeter held their ground against Toulon’s pack in an intense Champions Cup pool match in December and there will be no one off the bench this windy weekend against his former Wasps colleague Alfie Barbeary, now a Bath totem. Baxter compares Fisilau’s ability to make an impact in matches to England’s Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and suggests the former’s value is most evident when he is not in the squad. “When he was missing this season, it was so noticeable that he wasn’t in the team. That is the biggest compliment I can give him.”
Coincidentally, Fisilau, who currently lives in the hotel next to Sandy Park, and Feyi-Waboso will become roommates next season and play basketball together in their spare time. If the first ever needs top-level advice, the family knows who to call. “I saw Billy at Easter and he said if we had any questions to just let him know,” says Keni. “The Vunipolas and Faletau have known Greg since he was a baby, and he looked up to them as a child. They opened the door for young Tongans in England.” If, as Greg suspects, Makobilly also enters the family business – “Dad thinks he’ll be the best of all of us” – there could soon be another on the horizon.