A different captain will lead England in a one-day tournament against India, Pakistan and the West Indies in Sharjah in December ``in order to ensure that Michael is fully rested for the Test series which follows''. Nor will Atherton necessarily be captain for the five one-day internationals with which the tour of the Caribbean concludes in late March and early April.
The performance of the chosen captain for the Sharjah games, likely to be either Adam Hollioake or Alec Stewart, will be taken into account by the selectors, who meet to pick the winter touring teams on Sept 8.
It is the first time that responsibilities have been officially split between England's Test and one-day captains, and it is part of a growing trend, recently recognised also by Australia, to choose different teams for two quite different disciplines.
Atherton has been only a qualified success in a job in which to please everyone is simply impossible. Until this season, and briefly in Zimbabwe last winter, he has led nobly by example with the bat, averaging 44 as England captain and scoring eight of his 11 Test hundreds in that role.
But on bad days the television close-ups have emphasised every scowl and every piece of stubble on the captain's chin. He has been accused of glumness and a lack of inspiration but he has had to do his best in an era in which England have lacked matchwinning bowlers or batsmen of the highest class.
They have won 12, lost 16 and drawn 18 of his record 46 games in charge since taking over from Graham Gooch at a time when England had lost seven of their previous eight Tests.
Fred Titmus, a selector in Ray Illingworth's committee, criticised the decision to retain the captain last night and another former England batsman, now a prominent county official, said: ``Atherton is no longer a selector himself but it seems he's more important than the chairman of selectors if he's allowed to make up his own mind whether to lead his country. Having one captain for the Tests in the West Indies and another member of the team taking over for the one-dayers sounds to me like two women in the same kitchen. It will end in tears.''
Even after England's fifth successive defeat by Australia, however, no one could be sure that any other candidate would do the job better. Stewart would probably have taken England to the West Indies if Atherton had not decided, after five days spent analysing his future, to carry on. He had been urged to do so both by David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, and Bob Bennett, chairman of the England management committee, who will manage the side in the West Indies.
The decision came within the province of the selectors and only Bennett could have overruled them. At least three other members of the wider England committee felt that the time had come for a change, if only to prepare an alternative captain for the next challenge against Australia, starting in only 14 months' time.
Ironically, however, Atherton is soldiering on partly because he is much happier than he was with the new structure of support for the England team which began with the formation of the England Cricket Board under the chairmanship of Lord MacLaurin in January this year.
He admitted yesterday that England's win in the sixth Test at the Oval had helped him to make up his mind. He confessed to concern about his own scanty contribution to the Ashes series with the bat - 257 runs at 23 with only two fifties - but added that, given a rest and after careful work on his technique before Christmas with Gooch, he believed his form would return.
Dressed in his England blazer, and flanked by Graveney, he told a press conference at Lord's: ``I had to ask myself three questions: whether I had the desire, whether I could get my batting back to its best and whether the selectors and the team still wanted me.''
They did. The man described by Steve Waugh as being like a cockroach who keeps coming back when people think he has been squashed, is certainly capable of fulfilling his prophesy that England will win in the West Indies, even of having one more go at the Australians in 1998-99, but only if his authority with the bat is restored.