THERE was a bizarre story a while ago about Tonga's ex-Newcastle Falcon Epi Taione changing his name to Paddy Power to help promote an Irish bookmaker.

There now seems to be more power in one of Taione's bulging thighs than in the entire Irish team, who have misfired at the World Cup even more depressingly than England's reigning champions, who will be heading home if they fail to beat Tonga tonight.

It's amazing even to doubt England's ability to beat a side including Taione, who was briefly a cult hero at Kingston Park because of his barnstorming runs. Newcastle tried to convert him from a Jonah Lomu-style winger into a back row man, but he wasn't very receptive to learning new skills and they let him go to Sale, where he barely featured and departed under the cloud of biting allegations.

In one of the many generally dull columns being sent out from the World Cup camp, Rob Andrew enlivened his this week by observing: "Epi's a great player and a great character. It's no surprise he's called me boring - I spent most of my time at Newcastle trying to get him out of the pub! When Inga (Tuigamala) and Pat Lam left there was no-one to keep an eye on him and drag him out of the pubs and clubs. Jonny and Epi will know what to expect of each other, certainly with Epi playing at 12 we know he'll be a handful."

With Taione at inside centre, the outside centre isn't going to see the ball and there will be a temptation for Jonny to get involved in stopping the 19st Pacific powerhouse. But this is where England need to back brain against brawn, otherwise there's no point in persisting with Mathew Tait as their style of play so far has given him no chance to show his skills. They won't run through these Tongan big-hitters, so they'll have to run round them and give us something to cheer at last.

NO DOUBT someone will label me politically incorrect for suggesting Tongans are brainless. For all I know they have the IQ of Stephen Hawking, but they will have been denied the privileges in terms of education and facilities that the public school products in the England team have enjoyed.

Does that matter? The question is prompted partly by India winning the World Twenty20, after which the captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, praised the players from the backwaters.

"Guys from small towns are generally mentally and physically tougher," he said. "The smaller towns lack infrastructure and facilities so players from there have to work harder."

In rugby, as in cricket and most other sports, the players from out in the sticks who learn their game off the cuff without the dubious benefit of coaching are the ones with the flair. That's why India won in South Africa and why Seve Ballesteros, who learnt his game using nothing more than a 3-iron, became the world's most watchable golfer. He'll probably be bored to death watching the automatons at the Seve Trophy.

THE danger in India's Twenty20 triumph, as underlined by their return bringing Mumbai to a standstill, is that the subcontinent's power to rule the game will increase, as will the shift in emphasis towards crash, bang, wallop. The end result will be that no-one will want to bowl and, just as professional rugby becomes more like American Football, so cricket will become something akin to baseball.

In these circumstances, one of those headlines I thought I'd never see becomes even stranger. It appeared in The Observer and read: 'How Bill Midgley changed the world.'

Midgley was the Durham chairman and the article claims that he was hugely influential in swaying the ECB vote over the introduction of Twenty20 because after delivering what he says was "a five-minute diatribe listing all the negatives" he announced that he would vote in favour. His U-turn persuaded a few others and the vote was won 11-7. So now we know who to blame.

RETURNING to the question of whether coaching can destroy flair, it was a point made by Ottis Gibson during one of the most pleasurable interviews I have conducted. Ottis was in the running to be England's bowling coach when the job went to Kevin Shine, an appointment which was lambasted in this column. The difference is that Ottis is an excellent communicator, which is surely the essence of good coaching rather than technical gobbledegook