Instead of Bath, Manueli turned out for Harlequins - a team who play in the famous quartered shirt but in south east Melbourne, rather than south west London. It was the start of a family dynasty. Rob is the youngest of Manueli and Finau's eight children, their sixth son. Every weekend, all the boys would play rugby for Harlequins. "He was always very strong for his age," says Manueli of his youngest. "He's got no fear of anybody, Robert." Aged five, Valetini would come home from school on a Friday and change straight into his Harlequins kit, sleeping in it that night so he was ready for action on Saturday morning. Aged 12, tasked with writing about his ambitions for his future, Valetini still had rugby first and foremost in his mind. "When I grow up I want to play for Australia in rugby," he began John Carey was one of Valetini's coaches during his time at Melbourne Harlequins. "You think of him as being very physical now, but that was true even at a very young age," Carey says. "At under eight level, we played touch - a tackle was if you got two hands on the hips. "But at the end of the season, you'd always get the tackle bags out so that the kids who were moving up to full contact could start to practice. "You'd get volunteers from the parents to hold the tackle bags, and normally you've got these little kids who would just bounce off. "But none of the parents wanted to hold the tackle bags for Rob. He hit the tackle bags really hard even then. "The family would go in the backyard every night and play rugby - full-on tackle, so at a young age he got used to being tackled by much bigger kids. "When he went out on the field on a Saturday he wasn't scared of anyone."