If you listen to a captain enough times, no matter how hard he tries to disguise his inner feelings (and, in truth, Kevin Pietersen does not try very hard at all), the essence of his cricketing philosophy will out. More often than not, that philosophy is reinforced by the nature of the team the captain selects and the way that team play.

Four months or so into Pietersen's captaincy is time enough to suggest that he does not consider spin to be a legitimate part of the game - or at least an important part of a winning game plan - and when you are in the middle of a tour to India, that is a dangerous attitude to hold.

By the time you read this, England's fate in the third one-day international in Kanpur will more or less be known. It is likely, after the shellacking that England suffered in the first two matches, that the pack will have been shuffled. Graeme Swann, the senior spinner and the only specialist spinner in the squad, was added to the XII yesterday and will probably have got the nod for today's game, as he did, belatedly, for the Stanford winner-takes-all clash. A rebalancing of the team, to reflect the conditions more accurately, is likely.

Statistics from Twenty20 matches at Stanford's ground suggested that spin would play a crucial role and you should not need a laptop to tell you that spin plays an essential part in any match in India. Despite this, Swann's inclusion for the Stanford match was a case of his being the cricketer of last resort, as he has appeared to be in India. He is a cheerful soul, but even he might have been disconsolate during the first two weeks of this tour; after all, if the captain does not believe that you, as the sole specialist spinner, are integral to the team in India, the Jobcentre beckons.

The lack of a specialist spinner for the opening two one-day internationals reinforced the impression given by Pietersen that spin occupies a place on the margins of his radar. Just listen to some of the comments he has made since taking on the captaincy - this from one of his first press conferences, when he announced his team to take on South Africa at the Brit Oval: “I'm going to go with four fast bowlers and Monty [Panesar]. I think it is an aggressive move, a positive move. We need to take 20 wickets in this Test and I feel a lot more comfortable with four fast bowlers.”

No problems there because the Oval suits the quicker bowlers and the return of Andrew Flintoff and Stephen Harmison paved the way for a dead-rubber victory. It paved the way, too, for the pace-based formula that was used to hammer South Africa in the subsequent one-day series - and which has blinded the selectors since.

Now, here is Pietersen during the Stanford week: “It [playing two spinners] was probably not something I was thinking too much about at the start of the tournament, but having watched the last two matches, it would be stupid not to have a look at it.” Some might say that it was dim not to have considered the possibility beforehand, especially because Dave Mohammed, the Trinidad & Tobago spinner, had been the most dangerous bowler in the domestic tournament played at Stanford's ground in February.

Then, later in the week, when asked to discuss the conditions in Antigua, Pietersen said: “You've got 700 million people watching on Saturday, so you want a wicket where spinners don't really play a part. When spinners play such a big part in a one-day fixture, it's not a special wicket. I wish we could have come here and played on a wicket where we could have entertained a lot more.”

Now the inference is clear: spinners, in the world according to the England captain, are allowed to play a role, but only in so far as they are there as fodder for batsmen. It is almost as if they are a subspecies. Why should spinners not be important in one-day cricket? One-day cricket is becoming increasingly the preserve of the power players, so anything that helps to broaden its appeal beyond that should be celebrated. Variety is the key, and the ability to deceive through a flick of the wrist is no less important than being able to smash the ball out of the park or hurl the thing down at 90mph.

In one sense Pietersen's attitude to spin is odd, given that he started out as an off spinner, although he refers to his capabilities in that department so disparagingly (“my filthy off spin” was the latest description) that it is clear he would not lose any sleep facing his own bowling. Maybe his disregard is based on his outrageous capabilities as a batsman. The greatest spinners of the modern era - Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan - have suffered at his hands. When Warne was forced to bowl wide into the rough in Adelaide in 2006 as a way of stopping Pietersen scoring, it was the only time I had seen the great leg spinner run up the white flag; and when Pietersen switch-hit Muralitharan at Edgbaston for six, it was as if to say that domination was not enough - there had to be an element of humiliation as well.

Pietersen's disregard for spin may, then, come from his genius as a batsman, but it may also be a product of his upbringing: you can take the boy out of South Africa, but you can't take South Africa out of the boy. In no modern cricketing culture, save possibly the West Indies, does spin play such an insignificant role as in South Africa. You have to be of ripe vintage to remember the last time South Africa had a decent spinner.

These are early days in Pietersen's captaincy - which in most respects has been outstanding - and the tour to India is in its infancy, but if his team are to make a success on their travels, a change of mentality is urgently required. Touring India requires all kinds of mental and technical adjustments, the biggest being that what works in England does not necessarily work on the sub-continent. It is a place where subtlety, in bowling and batting, will be rewarded.

When Harmison, Flintoff and James Anderson fail to complete their allotted ten overs, as they did in the second one-day international in Indore on Monday, you can be sure that the wrong team were chosen. When the captain complains about the nature of the opposition's bowlers, as he did after losing to a virtual club team in Bombay, that “they bowled at spinners' pace, they were just 60mph dibbly-dobblers” (England 98 all out), you can be sure that he has yet to understand the peculiar nature of cricket in India.

On my first and only tour to India 15 years ago, I recall standing in the middle of Eden Gardens in Calcutta, staring at a dry, cracked pitch and wondering why, when India had just announced a team that included three spinners and one quick bowler, we were about to send out a battery of four quick bowlers. For the first two weeks of this tour it has been a case, as the great Yogi Berra said, of déjà vu all over again.