Joe Root will captain England in next week’s second Test against New Zealand after Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson were left out of the squad for breaking the team curfew as they celebrated victory in the first game of the series on Sunday night.

Stokes, the team’s full-time captain, is being given some time to consider his future after he contributed to the resurfacing of the debate about what is widely perceived as an unprofessional culture within the group. He is reported to have spent Wednesday in meetings with his agent and advisers. Atkinson will also miss the game, which is being played at the Oval, the Surrey seamer’s home ground.

“The England & Wales Cricket Board can confirm that, given the ongoing investigation, Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson have not been made available for selection for the second Test against New Zealand,” a statement read. “Yorkshire batter Joe Root will lead the team as interim captain.”

Root previously captained England in 64 Tests between 2017 and 2022 before stepping down with the side having won just one of their previous 17 games. He later said the experience “took the life of me” and left him “a shadow of the person that I want to be”. But in the absence of Stokes the 35-year-old is England’s most senior player by a distance: beyond him only the 32-year-old Ollie Robinson and 31-year-olds Jofra Archer and Ben Duckett are older than 28.

The decision to give Root the captaincy rather than Harry Brook, who replaced Ollie Pope has the Test team’s vice-captain last September, will raise eyebrows. It may well have been decided that responding to Stokes’s predicament by promoting Brook, whose captaincy of England’s white-ball teams was put in jeopardy because of his own nightclub altercation – in his case in Wellington on the eve of an ODI last November – would invite further criticism. But it may also have been considered sensible to spare him the added responsibility, given that he will be leading England into a T20 series against India potentially less than 48 hours after the final game against New Zealand concludes at Trent Bridge at the end of the month.

The absence of Stokes and Atkinson, combined with the hand injury sustained by Brydon Carse during a training session in April that means the 30-year-old has not played since the end of the Ashes in January, means England will be without three of their four leading wicket-takers over the last two years.

As a result they are very likely to bring two seamers into their team next week, likely to be Sonny Baker – who was close to being given a Test debut in the opening game of the series – and Jofra Archer, who returns to the squad after his efforts for Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League with a short break in Barbados. Surrey’s Matthew Fisher is also in the squad.

The dilemma facing Brendon McCullum, the England coach, will be whether to also bolster the batting, which would mean leaving out Shoaib Bashir. Bashir played at Lord’s but was not required to bowl, and in his only previous Test outing at the Oval, against Sri Lanka in 2024, took one wicket for 65.

That could mean a return for Leicestershire’s leg-spinning all-rounder Rehan Ahmed, the 21-year-old boasting a first-class batting average that at 32.69 is nearly four times Bashir’s 8.70. Alternatively they could go without a frontline spinner, in the knowledge that both Root and Jacob Bethell could contribute if required. That would allow Somerset’s James Rew to come into the team to make his debut, having been the spare batter in the squad for the opening of the series, while Jordan Cox of Essex has been added to the group.