Stokes out of second Test with New Zealand over nightclub incident as Root made captain

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.

While the England & Wales Cricket Board continue their investigation into that incident Stokes, the team’s full-time captain, is being given some time to consider his future. He is reported to have spent Wednesday in meetings with his agent and advisers debating whether to permanently stand down as captain, or to end his international career completely. He may still choose to do neither, with the former England captain Michael Vaughan having joined those backing him to stay. “Yes, he broke a curfew,” Vaughan said. “Is that a sacking offence as England’s Test captain? I don’t think so. A short suspension would be fine, but this is not a big enough incident over which to lose the captaincy.”

Atkinson will also miss the game, with the ECB indicating they will not consider either player until they have concluded their investigation. The final match in the series starts at Trent Bridge on 25 June, and with the ECB having warned that their probe may take some weeks both players’ participation in that game is also in doubt. Rob Key, the organisation’s managing director of men’s cricket, will speak to the media on Thursday to provide some clarity over their position after they released a short statement on Wednesday confirming that “given the ongoing investigation, Stokes and Atkinson have not been made available for selection”.

Root has been appointed interim captain, having previously led England in 64 Tests between 2017 and 2022 before stepping down with the side on a run of just one win in 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”, and in 84 innings since giving up the responsibility his batting average, which was 46.44 while he led the side, has leapt to 54.90. 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 Archer and Ben Duckett are older than 28.

Given the reignited debate over the England squad’s drinking culture Root is also, importantly, unsullied by alcohol-related scandal – at least in the 13 years since he was punched by Australia’s David Warner in a Birmingham bar in 2013, apparently for inappropriately wearing a green-and-gold Australia wig.

While he was at the White Horse pub in Parsons Green, where a group of England’s cricketers moved on Sunday evening to continue the victory celebrations that started at Lord’s following the conclusion of their win over New Zealand, he returned to the team hotel in time to meet their midnight curfew rather than continue with Stokes and Atkinson to Chelsea’s Rex Rooms nightclub. It was there, at around 1am, that a fight broke out which is believed to have seen the 6ft 5in, 21-year-old Saracens academy player Totoa Auvaa aim a punch at Atkinson that connected instead with a security guard hired by the ECB, leaving him requiring stitches.

While Harry Brook replaced Ollie Pope as the Test team’s vice-captain last September, in the circumstances responding to Stokes’s predicament by promoting the 27-year-old would have invited further criticism, given he recently came close to being stripped of his captaincy of England’s white-ball teams as a result of his own nightclub altercation – in his case in Wellington on the eve of an ODI last November. But with the interim captaincy likely to last until the end of the series it may also have been considered sensible to spare him the added responsibility, with a T20 series against India starting at Chester-le-Street potentially less than 48 hours after the final game against New Zealand concludes in Nottingham.

The absence of Stokes and Atkinson, combined with the hand injury sustained by Brydon Carse during a training session in April, 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, and they are expected 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 country on Thursday after following his efforts for Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League with a short break in Barbados. Surrey’s Matthew Fisher has kept his place 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 – the fourth of those leading wicket-takers. Bashir played at Lord’s but did not bowl a ball, 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 likely 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 game of the series, while Jordan Cox of Essex has been added to the group.