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Few recall the final delivery of the Ashes. It's the first that's famous. That wide that reaches the slip cordon, that beautiful stroke for four, that dismissal, shattering the stumps! Concluding moments? I had to look them up. Moeen Ali cutting a stroke behind to finish an innings rout in a dead rubber in 2015; Rankin being taken at slip off Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the tail-end of a 30-over collapse in a 5-0 whitewash that's been plentiful in 2014; a Steve Harmison short ball ricocheting away Justin Langer's shoulder for four leg byes, the single four the Australian team achieve in a run chase they'll not undertake in 2005.

It's the difference between speculating how things will go, and knowing how they do. One undeniable fact, there's no certainty there will be a happy ending. For the past ten years, England's Australian tours have finished in defeat, instead of with them. Flower lost his job as coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood was let go after another, in 2021-22. You can make a two lineups out of national team members who played their last Test match at the conclusion of an tour to Australia during the last quarter-century, and even have a several individuals over to carry the drinks for either side.

Stokes' squad have not professed to care too much about results. Stokes, like Morgan with the one-day side before him, frequently remarks that whether or not a aerial shot is caught on the boundary isn't as important as if it was the right decision to play it in the outset, and during play he's quick to praise a pitcher who concedes runs so long as they are bringing the team closer to taking that next wicket. But then the primary motive Stokes tried to teach his team to adopt this approach was so they would be in a more advantageous state to produce the brand of the game he believes will do well for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been planning extensively, already seems like the result they are bound to face. It is Bazball's decisive moment. And there are too many “I told you so’s” in English cricket for the team to get away with it if they do suffer another poor loss in the upcoming period. Stokes's approach has been based on proving everyone wrong, and the other side is it feels as if there are plenty of people who would be pleased to be validated.

In light of this, it's a appropriate time to highlight that the crucial matter is not only where this all ends up, but whether or not we had fun along the way. A few years back, England were an thoroughly poor sports team. They had been beaten in a quartet of successive tournaments and were trailing in the fifth one, against the Indian team, when it was postponed because of Covid. They had won a single Test match out of seventeen, and lost 12 of them by large defeats. A loss by eight wickets to the Black Caps at Edgbaston, 157 runs to the Indian squad at the the London ground, an a comprehensive loss to the Aussie team at Melbourne, A ten-wicket loss to the Windies in the island nation.

The team was soundly beaten by West Indies in Grenada in the early part of 2022 just before Joe Root stepped down as leader.

By the conclusion, after all those months of testing and social distancing and biosecure bubbles and constant defeats at the hands of each rival, they were practically the most disheartened and exhausted Test team the English cricket board had ever fielded to a cricket field. A significant portion of what Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have done in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the former's experiences during his hiatus from the game in 2021 when he had suffered a bout of anxiety. It was intended to emphasize to all that it was supposed to be enjoyable, if it was supposed to be anything.

It still is now. Even when the the prestigious contest is on the line, and although the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they approach competing. Normal existence has a way of intruding, it can be difficult to remember the insights we gain in our most difficult periods.

This is the national side that peeled off consecutive run chases of significant totals in one period against the Black Caps; that achieved a massive 378 to defeat the subcontinent giants that same summer; that became the pioneering away squad to win a comprehensive victory in the host nation; that battled hard to a stalemate after going two games behind in the the contest; that overcame the Indian team in the historic venue off the back of one of the most remarkable knocks ever played in the the area, and then defeated Pakistan in Multan off the back of a subsequent one.

Here we have the English squad, too, that managed to end up being defeated in a Test by an large margin even though the other team made a relatively low total; who fetched up suffering a loss in one of the finer contests ever contested after making a confident decision in the first innings against New Zealand, and then followed suit against the Australian team; who were routed by 434 runs in the Indian city, and who were on the wrong end of one of the Sri Lankan team's most notable triumphs. Between them, they have secured some of the unlikeliest wins, endured some of the poorest performances, achieved some of the unlikeliest hundreds, and secured some of the most surprising five-wicket hauls in the history of the English game.

No matter how this historic contest concludes, they have been, successively, amazing, outrageous, ridiculous, infuriating, and entirely, without regret, unapologetically entertaining.