Behind the scenes at England's India defeat post-mortem

"Gather round, lads," said Stuart Broad. "Let's have a session of positives-taking and then see if we can't concentrate on our momentum."

Reluctantly, players put down their PlayStation controllers and stopped tweeting. Tim Bresnan picked listlessly at a Heinz All-Day Breakfast in a Can, one of 144 that he had brought over from home. The food in these subcontinental countries could be as dodgy as the spinners. The chef in the hotel hadn't even heard of Branston Pickle when he'd asked for some on his king prawn curry yesterday. Bresnan wondered if the bloke was even a real chef at all.

"So where did we go wrong?" asked Broad. "Why did our plan of blocking the first five and then closing our eyes and swinging hard at the sixth one fail to execute despite our focusing and preparationing?"

"It's Kevin Pietersen's fault," said Graeme Swann. There was a murmur of agreement.

"It so totally is," said Steve Finn. "Apparently Kevin's cousin is seeing this girl who knows a boy who was talking to this girl in Nando's, and she like said, 'Oh my God, Kevin thinks that we are all really bad at playing spin', and apparently Kevin said that Morgs was, like, a really massive slag, and he probably, like, told Harbhajan how to bowl us out by talking to him on Facebook."

"I am totally going to defriend him on Facebook," said Bresnan.

"Seriously, like me too?" said Broad. "Like, to show leadership?"

"And he totally said that Samit was fat," said Finn.

Samit Patel waved a chicken leg around angrily.

"As official team banterologist I can definitely say that Kevin's bants went beyond the acceptable level of bants on recent occasions," said Swann. "We're better off without him in all three key departments of top-level cricket: Twitter, team spirit and banter."

"The important thing, though, is that now we are all united as one and the spirit in the dressing room among the lads couldn't be better," said Broad.

"Although we do keep losing all the cricket matches," said Patel.

Broad shook his head sadly. Sometimes he wondered if Samit really got the whole team-spirit thing at all. Perhaps it was time for some tactical tweeting, which he would obviously have nothing to do with whatsoever.