LONG READ Malelili Satala: The Scottish-Fijian starlet who slept outside a train station to make it

Malelili Satala has stories for days. Tales about police searches and barefoot rugby, floods and power cuts, deprivation and devotion. He drops one after another, in a relaxed, matter-of-fact way, as though casually remarking on the weather or the price of petrol. No big deal. Such is life.

The most striking yarn of all involves Satala and the cold slabs outside an East Midlands train station. He was 17 years old and a burgeoning rugby player. He’d been living in the UK less than a year and was selected for his first Leicester Under-18s camp. The problem was, Satala lived in Stoke-on-Trent, more than an hour outside the city. His parents were out grafting, making sure they earned enough to support vast families back home in Fiji. And so Satala found himself staring at a train timetable and a dilemma.

If he rode the rails that night, he’d be in the right spot but with nowhere to stay and no cash for a room. Travel the next morning, and he’d arrive late for his first session. That wouldn’t do.

“The train at night was cheaper and would get me there on time,” he says. “I wanted to make sure I was there, ready to put my best foot forward.

“I didn’t tell my parents I was leaving that night. I got on the train and decided I would sleep at the train station. Some stations wouldn’t let you stay overnight, so I slept outside the station on the ground. I filled up my bag with clothes to keep me warm. I stuffed a cotton blanket in my bag and lay on top of that, used my bag as a pillow and lay in my coat trying to get as much rest as possible. The next morning, I tried my best to sharpen up and went to training.

“In my head, that was normal for me. Just another day. I told some people the story and they were like, ‘What the hell? You slept at a train station?’

“You think that’s bad, live in my shoes in Fiji for a day – I don’t think you’d survive.”

Sportspeople talk often of resilience. Satala had it drilled into him from birth. He is 21 now and gaining some traction on the wing for Edinburgh, but his road to the professional game was littered with obstacles.

A lot of the guys were three or four years older, or some of my uncles who were teenagers. I was exposed to those big boys and didn’t take a backwards step.

He was born in the Scottish capital because his father, the Fiji international Apolosi, spent a season there towards the end of his stellar playing career. While the Satalas – Apolosi in the army, his wife as a nurse – worked, they decided the best thing for their baby son was a Fijian childhood. Before his first birthday, Satala moved to the family farm near Nausori, 20 minutes down the road from the capital city of Suva. For 16 years, his grandparents raised him, instilling in their boy the importance of diligence and sacrifice.

“It was such a blessing because they taught me the upbringing, the foundations of the Fijian life,” Satala says. “The path of respecting elders, Christianity and what it’s rooted in. I try to live by that day to day. They made such a big impact on who I am now. They taught me about gratitude, humility, discipline. Simple things Fiji stands for.

“A lot of grandparents are very old school, yes is yes and no is no. It made me tough. You get back from school at half three and by ten to four I was out on the farm until six, then six til seven I would play a bit of rugby in our village. A lot of the guys were three or four years older, or some of my uncles who were teenagers. I was exposed to those big boys and didn’t take a backwards step.”

There were rough days, no question. The bottom floor of the house often flooded and the family would grab their belongings and cram into the crowded level above. They’d light cotton-soaked kerosene when the electricity failed and eat fish for weeks when meat was too scarce or too expensive.

Satala could be an unruly kid and his grandmother once launched a full-scale police search when he went for an impromptu sleepover with a friend. A succession of Melanesian “hidings” – from his grandmother, grandfather and uncles – duly followed.

“We were not financially stable. We only had enough money to live through the month. Things I wanted as a young kid, I wouldn’t get. I didn’t have any rugby boots so when I was selected for our province, Tailevu, I had to switch boots with the players who were playing. My best friend, who is in the army now, had the same shoe size and played the same position. When he came off, he’d take his boots off real quick, I’d put them on and run on the field.

“The majority of the time, the food we had was home-grown. We had to grow it and make sure we had enough for the whole family. We tried our best to look after each other but sometimes it can only go so far.

“We didn’t moan about it, we just tried to make use of it. We tried to turn the negatives into positives. ‘Oh, we don’t have a rugby ball – let’s get a Coke bottle, fill it up with wet tissue paper and that’s our ball’. If we did that here, people would be like, ‘What the hell are you doing? That goes in the bin.’ In our Fijian eyes, that was a rugby ball. We could turn nothing into something. You don’t have any trainers or boots, screw that, let’s play barefoot. We don’t have a field? Let’s play on the gravel. Not nice gravel, the pebbles, the pointy rocks. When we saw a random place, we’d clean it up and use it as a pitch.

“We always had a smile on our faces. I don’t think anything could get in my way to the point where I say, ‘Oh, I’m stuck’.”

I knew I was their son but I was trying to understand their behaviour, their moods, how they speak, what sets them off or makes them laugh.

For a time, Satala thought his grandparents were Mum and Dad. He cannot remember exactly when his folks ceased being passionate but occasional visitors or faces on a screen half the world away. He can recall the curious realisation he did not truly know them as people. He joined them in England aged 16 and his life changed profoundly.

“In Fiji, I didn’t have scooby doo what was going on,” he says. “I was living in the moment, not worrying about what I was going to eat or wear. I would go for a swim, see my grandparents, sing, drink kava. Every now and then I would talk to my mum and dad but my knowledge of them as my parents was very shallow.

“I was almost exploring, unsure where I stood. I knew I was their son but I was trying to understand their behaviour, their moods, how they speak, what sets them off or makes them laugh.

“I wanted to throw myself in but I couldn’t because I just didn’t know how things would turn out. I was scared to express myself. The older I got, the more my mum and dad spoke to me, and said I could be myself. I could be who I am in front of them and nothing would change. Throughout the years the bond got stronger and stronger.”

Satala arrived in the UK with barely a word of English and no knowledge of western custom. The police were called when he went to chop firewood near the local park with a machete and a wheelbarrow. School only amplified the foreign nature of his new home.

“One day, the teacher was writing stuff on the board for us to copy down. I’ve got the jotter in front of me, it’s closed and the pen is on top. I look to my left, look to my right, people are writing stuff down. I can’t speak English; I don’t know what the teacher is staying.

“As all the students are writing, the teacher is walking around and looking at their books. She sees mine is closed. I look up at her. ‘Why are you not writing anything?’ I don’t know what she is saying. I kept looking at her and she asked me again. I said ‘yep’. I just kept saying ‘yep, yep’. When her tone got louder, I changed to ‘no, no’. The only things I knew were yes and no. I had to learn English very quickly.”

In rugby, Satala found some cherished familiarity. He drilled his catch-pass skills and mighty Apolosi, 6ft 4ins with a playing weight of 111kg, honed his tackling by repeatedly running over his son. Satala got into Brooksby Melton College, which has close links with the Tigers, and eventually earned an academy deal.

Me living in Fiji almost means I can live anywhere – put me in any situation and I will thrive. I lived through struggles. I know how tough it gets.

For all that rugby has changed, the Leicester ethos remains steeped in iron. It’s a school of belligerence for young pups and Satala carries the lessons it taught him. He won England U20 recognition and played down the leagues with Leicester Lions and Nottingham. Michael Cheika was an admirer and gave him a debut in last season’s Prem Cup.

“I had Steve Borthwick, Dan McKellar and Michael Cheika as coaches. I enjoyed Cheika the most because I got to have a lot of chats with him. He didn’t sugar coat things, he told you what was expected, and if you are not good enough, he will tell you straight-up, but only because he knows you can do better.

“He was such an old-school coach in how he did things. It suited the DNA of Leicester: set-piece, physicality, a bullying team. I enjoyed that. I learned that very quickly and almost made it part of me wherever I go. I still have that element in the back of my head.”

Satala is raw but boy, he’s driven. He’s lithe, explosive and learning all the time. Sean Everitt, Edinburgh’s head coach, thinks highly of him. In his first proper season of top-end rugby, he’s started six of the club’s past seven games and five in a row. Eligible for Scotland, Fiji and England, he’s ballsy enough to dream big but smart enough to keep those dreams to himself.

“You need exposure in the Prem or URC to get the real taste of men’s rugby,” he says. “The Champ can only take you so far.

“I’m enjoying training consistently with the boys and getting my game time, learning off Darcy Graham and Duhan van der Merwe and Harry Paterson, and exploring a bit more about myself as well.

“Sometimes you wouldn’t even train with the first team at Leicester, there were so many players. Here it is quite integrated. The young boys are hungry to step up and showcase what they’ve got. Coaches see that. Us young boys are stepping up and showcasing when there’s an injury, there’s no thought of going around clubs asking for loans because we are taking the baton.”

Every day, without fail, Satala gets a video call from Nausori. While in Stellenbosch last week, he was woken in the early hours of the morning because his grandmother, nearly five years since his departure, still hasn’t quite cracked the time difference. They share an unbreakable bond.

“It’s such a blessing to know my grandparents are still alive, they’ve seen me play in real life, they stay in tune with my rugby over here and they are sent videos from my family members of how I’m performing. Me being here is giving back to what they’ve done in my life.”

In a sense, Satala’s journey is the antidote to the well-trodden path of British youth rugby. The game is still heavily populated by private schoolboys earmarked early for the elite game and hoovered up by Prem clubs in their mid-teens. While they were cocooned in the trappings of an upper-middle class childhood, Satala was cocooned in a cotton blanket on the pavement outside a train station. Yet poor in monetary terms, he was rich in so many other ways.

“Me living in Fiji almost means I can live anywhere – put me in any situation and I will thrive. I lived through struggles. I know how tough it gets. I’m used to things not going my way. I’ve dealt with this my whole life. It’s nothing new.

“If I drop a ball, I can throw my hands up and have a fit about it or go again. Sometimes it’s easy to complain about the food and then I look back to my days in Fiji when I was eating bread and drinking lemon tea. It built a resilience in me to keep turning up, keep going forward.”

Malelili Satala has stories for days. He’s packed more into 21 years than many do in a lifetime. And in a rugby sense, he’s only getting started.