Telusa Veainu was enjoying an autumnal day off from Stade Francais last Wednesday when RugbyPass unwittingly took the pep from his step by mentioning over the phone the deflating news that had broken in England the day before.
Wasps had provided a seriously disappointing medical bulletin on the status of Malakai Fekitoa, the former All Blacks midfielder who was recently able to change his Test XV allegiance to Tonga after representing their 7s side in June in the Olympic qualifier held in Monaco.
Rather than now giddily going on and playing for the Tongans in the upcoming internationals versus Scotland at Murrayfield and England at Twickenham, a shoulder dislocation has ruled out the 29-year-old who earned the last of his 24 All Blacks caps in 2017.
The revelation about Fekitoa had eluded Veainu, who had spent his Tuesday winding up his football-mad Stade teammates at training by claiming he was a Manchester City fan before that night’s clash with PSG at the Parc des Princes across the road from his current club’s Stade Jean-Bouin stadium.
“I’m not really a big football fan but I know boys at the club are big PSG fans. I was supporting Man City just to stir the pot a little bit. It’s the hottest ticket around town at the moment, the PSG ones,” he quipped at the start of the interview with RugbyPass.
Veainu went on to be playfully polite and well-spoken on a myriad of topics, even when it came it to reflections on his delicate contract rebel exit from Leicester in July 2020. However, the prognosis about Fekitoa now being unavailable for the internationals on October 30 and November 6 left him flustered. “Is he (out)? I didn’t even know that. Ah, f**k that… ah s**t!
“As soon as he qualified a lot of the boys sent him messages, ‘This is awesome’. It was just a good vibe. I spoke to some of the boys from the 7s and they were so happy to see him come back and to give back to Tonga. It was really good.”