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People rarely mention the last ball of the Ashes. That initial ball that's famous. That errant delivery that goes to the slips, that elegant shot for four, that dismissal, clean bowled! Concluding moments? I needed to check. Ali edging a shot behind to conclude a batting effort defeat in a dead rubber in 2015; Rankin being caught in the slips off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his single Test at the tail-end of a 30-over collapse in a comprehensive defeat that's been commonplace in 2014; a Harmison rising delivery ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for runs, the sole boundary the Aussies achieve in a run chase they'll not undertake in 2005.

It distinguishes between questioning how things will go, and understanding how they do. One thing's certain, there's no assurance there will be a positive outcome. For the past ten years, England's visits to Australia have finished in defeat, as opposed to with them. Flower lost his job as manager after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood was let go after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. One could assemble a pair of XIs out of national team members who played their last Test match at the back end of an trip Down Under during the last quarter-century, and additionally have a few players over to serve as reserves for either side.

Stokes' squad have never claimed to care too much about consequences. Ben Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, frequently remarks that whether or not a lifted stroke is caught on the boundary matters less as whether it was the correct choice to play it in the beginning, and in the field he's happy to clap a pitcher who gives away boundaries so long as they are bringing the team closer to taking that following breakthrough. But then the primary motive Ben Stokes tried to guide his players to follow this style was so they would be in a superior situation to deliver the kind of cricket he believes will succeed for them in Australia.

The forthcoming contest, for which they have been preparing for so long, already seems like the result they can't get away from. It is this bold strategy's critical moment. And there are too many warnings of defeat in the national sport for the team to get away with it if they do experience another poor loss in the upcoming period. The captain's strategy has been predicated on proving everyone wrong, and the counterpart is it appears there are numerous observers who would be thrilled to be validated.

Given that, it's a suitable occasion to point out that the crucial matter goes beyond where this ultimately leads, but whether or not we had fun along the way. In the recent past, the English team were an utterly abject sports team. They had been defeated in a quartet of successive tournaments and were lagging in the fifth, against the Indian team, when it was suspended because of the virus. They had won exactly one Test match out of seventeen, and lost a dozen of them by humiliating deficits. Eight wickets to New Zealand at the historic venue, A 157-run loss to India at the the famous stadium, an innings and 14 runs to the Aussie team at Melbourne, A defeat by ten wickets to the Windies in Grenada.

The team was soundly beaten by the Caribbean team in Grenada in spring 2022 just before Root stepped aside as leader.

By the end, after all those periods of nasal swabs and social distancing and restricted environments and constant defeats at the hands of each rival, they were just about the most disheartened and weary Test team the English cricket board had ever sent out to a sports ground. A significant portion of what Ben Stokes and McCullum have done in the following period was in response to all that, as well as the Stokes' experiences during his hiatus from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a series of panic attacks. It was created to emphasize to all that it was intended as fun, if it was supposed to be something.

That remains true now. Despite when the Ashes is on the line, and regardless if the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they approach playing the game. Everyday life has a way of imposing, it can be hard to hold on to the insights we gain in our lowest moments.

Here is the national side that peeled off back-to-back fourth-innings chases of three challenging targets in one summer against New Zealand; that achieved a huge total to overcome India that identical season; that became the pioneering away squad to win a whitewash in Pakistan; that battled hard to a stalemate after going 2-0 down in the Ashes; that defeated India in the southern city off the back of one of the greatest innings ever performed in the the region, and then overcame the Pakistani team in the location off the back of a subsequent one.

It is the English squad, too, that managed to end up suffering a defeat in a Test by an large margin even though the opposition made only 326; who concluded losing one of the better Tests ever contested after making a cocksure declaration in the opening session against the Kiwis, and then did the same thing against the Australian team; who were routed by a massive 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of the island nation's most notable triumphs. As a unit, they have secured some of the surprising successes, experienced some of the most embarrassing exits, made some of the surprising centuries, and taken some of the most startling five-wicket hauls in the records of the national sport.

However this prestigious tournament shakes out, they have been, one after another, astonishing, preposterous, unconventional, infuriating, and totally, unapologetically, unapologetically thrilling.