Seru Rabeni: Rugby union player who helped Fiji reach the World Cup quarters and won two Premiership titles with Leicester

His admirers nicknamed him 'Rambo', in tribute to his heavy-hitting tackles

Rabeni scores for Leicester in 2008; he was known to admirers as ‘Rambo'. (David Jones/PA Wire)

Seru Rabeni, who has died of a suspected heart attack at the age of 37, was a celebrated rugby union centre and utility back. His admirers nicknamed him “Rambo”, in tribute to his heavy-hitting tackles.

He was born in Nabouwalu on the south-western tip of Vanua Levu, the northern of Fiji’s two main islands. He went to Ratu Kadavulevu School and studied at Lautoka Teachers College then the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. While working as a teacher, Rabeni played for Lautoka and Suva in Fiji, and then for Otago in New Zealand’s National Provincial Championship, before he landed a contract in Super Rugby with the Otago-based Highlanders for the 2003 and 2004 seasons. The indigenous pronunciation of his surname – a soft “m” sound is combined with the hard “b” consonant – enabled admirers to give him his “Rambo” nickname.

Rabeni moved to England to play for Leicester Tigers in 2004, making his debut as a substitute at Sale in September of that year, in a team including two England captains, Martin Johnson and Martin Corry, and scoring five tries in his next four league appearances. Rabeni would go on to collect 18 tries in 63 first-team matches for Leicester, but the fact that they spanned five seasons spoke of his struggle with knee injuries and his resolve to continue playing for Fiji, with whom he won 30 caps, and for the composite Fiji-Samoa-Tonga team, the Pacific Islanders, for whom he played nine Tests.

“Rugby is the only sport in Fiji that does not need more than an empty space to play the game,” he said recently. “Once you got that space, all you needed was a coconut or bottle to get started.”

Highlights of his Leicester career were a league and Anglo-Welsh Cup double in 2006-07, including a significant contribution on the wing to the thumping Premiership final win over Gloucester, 44-16 at Twickenham. There was a second Premiership title in 2008-09 before Rabeni agreed a three-year deal with Gloucester that was aborted when he failed a medical.

Instead, he spent the 2009-10 season with Leeds Carnegie and was almost ever-present as the perennial strugglers finished 10th out of 12 in the Premiership, avoiding relegation. His form saw him voted into the Premiership’s team of the season.

The testimony of colleagues at Leicester – players, coaches and board members – is that Rabeni brought an immensely likeable mixture of the qualities long associated with players from the Pacific Islands. Though weighing almost 18 stones, and standing 6ft 2in tall, he possessed quick feet and the athletic mobility to make unpredictable sidesteps a prominent feature of his game, and he combined the skills of evasion and offloading accurately to team-mates in tight spaces with the ability to dominate opponents physically if necessary.

This brought back-rowers and outside backs into play and embellished the Tigers’ reputation for set-piece solidity. At a club where fights were a notorious feature of training sessions, he was known for breaking into a broad smile as he pulled off a tricky move or clever pass, lending levity to a hard-bitten regime.

A rare blip was the 14-week suspension he received in March 2008 for making contact with the eye area of an opponent in a Premiership match against Saracens. An appeal that it was accidental was dismissed.

Internationally, Rabeni appeared for Fiji’s renowned Sevens team in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, and twice in the Hong Kong Sevens (1999 and 2000). In 15-a-side, his first and last Test appearances were against Japan, in Tokyo in May 2000 and in Lautoka in July 2011.

Rabeni played in the first of his two World Cups in Australia in 2003, appearing in four matches. Four years later he was a star of Fiji’s momentous campaign at the 2007 tournament in France, where he played in four of his country’s five matches, including the famous pool-stage win over Wales in Nantes and the quarter-final defeat to the eventual champions, South Africa, in Marseilles.

After leaving Leeds he played for the French clubs La Rochelle, being named in a multi-national Top 14 dream team alongside Toulon’s Jonny Wilkinson at the end of 2010, and Mont-de-Marsan until 2013, and for the Barbarians in 2011, before he began a coaching career – firstly with a college team in the US and then as a player-coach with Discovery Bay Pirates in Hong Kong, where he was studying for a Masters in sports marketing and business management.

This was part of Rabeni’s efforts to tackle social issues in his homeland. He described himself recently as having been raised “on the poverty line” in the village of Nasolo, and the Daily Mail reported in 2009 how the softly-spoken Fijian was supporting projects aimed at alleviating poverty on Vanua Levu, with the improvement of water and electricity supplies, and community buildings. He also spoke of the need for better education. “I can’t get away from the village - it is my life,” he said at the time. “If I had millions I would definitely change it overnight.”

Ratu Seru Raveive Rabeni, rugby union player and coach: born Bua, Fiji 27 December 1978; died 15 March 2016.