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People rarely mention the final delivery of the Ashes. It's the first that's legendary. That stray ball that flies to slip, that elegant shot for four, that dismissal, clean bowled! Concluding moments? I had to look them up. Ali cutting a stroke behind to finish an innings loss in a inconsequential game in 2015; Boyd Rankin being caught in the slips off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the tail-end of a rapid downfall in a 5-0 whitewash that's been plentiful in 2014; a Harmison bouncer glancing off Justin Langer's shoulder for extras, the sole boundary Australia manage in a run chase they'll not attempt in 2005.

It's the difference between speculating how things will go, and seeing how they do. One certainty is, there's no assurance there will be a positive outcome. For the previous decade, the English Australian tours have finished in defeat, as opposed to with them. Flower was dismissed as head coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood was let go after another, in 2021-22. You can make a couple of teams out of English cricketers who played their last Test match at the back end of an trip Down Under during the last quarter-century, and even have a couple of men over to carry the drinks for both teams.

This England team have never claimed to worry excessively about outcomes. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, always says that regardless of whether a aerial shot is grabbed near the fence is secondary as if it was the correct choice to play it in the beginning, and in the field he's happy to clap a pitcher who allows scoring shots so long as they bringing the team toward taking that following breakthrough. But then the key rationale Stokes tried to guide his players to follow this style was so they would be in a superior situation to produce the style of play he feels will succeed for them in Australia.

The forthcoming contest, for which they have been preparing for so long, already feels like the result they can't get away from. It is this aggressive approach's make or break moment. And there are too many warnings of defeat in English cricket for the team to avoid backlash if they do endure a further bad defeat in the coming weeks. The captain's strategy has been predicated on defying expectations, and the other side is it feels as if there are many individuals who would be delighted to be validated.

Considering this, it's a suitable occasion to emphasize that the key issue isn't just where this concludes, but if we had fun along the way. Four years ago, England were an utterly abject cricket team. They had been defeated in four consecutive series and were trailing in the final one, against the Indian team, when it was suspended because of the virus. They had won only one Test match out of seventeen, and lost 12 of them by humiliating deficits. A loss by eight wickets to the Kiwis at Edgbaston, 157 runs to India at the the London ground, an an innings defeat to the Aussie team at the iconic ground, A ten-wicket loss to the Caribbean side in the island nation.

The English side was routed by the Windies in the venue in March 2022 just before Root stepped down as leader.

By the conclusion, after all those stretches of nasal swabs and social distancing and biosecure bubbles and constant defeats at the hands of each rival, they were just about the most disheartened and careworn Test team England had ever fielded to a playing arena. A great deal of what Stokes and McCullum have done in the years since was in a consequence of all that, as well as the former's experiences during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had endured a bout of anxiety. It was designed to emphasize to all that it was intended as entertaining, if it was meant to be anything at all.

This continues to be the case now. Despite when the the historic series is on the line, and even if the team have finally recognized that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they go about performing. Normal existence has a way of imposing, it can be challenging to retain the knowledge we acquire in our most difficult periods.

Here is the England team that achieved back-to-back fourth-innings chases of three challenging targets in one period against New Zealand; that made a huge total to defeat the Indian team that same summer; that became the first touring team to win a clean sweep in Pakistan; that battled hard to a tie after going 2-0 down in the the contest; that defeated the Indian team in Hyderabad off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever executed in the subcontinent, and then defeated the Pakistani team in Multan off the back of a further exceptional performance.

Here we have the English squad, too, that managed to end up being defeated in a Test by an innings defeat even though the opposition made a modest 326; who fetched up losing one of the better Tests ever staged after making a confident decision in the initial batting effort against the Kiwis, and then repeated the action against the Aussies; who were routed by 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of the Sri Lankan team's finest wins. Between them, they have recorded some of the surprising successes, suffered some of the most embarrassing exits, scored some of the unlikeliest centuries, and taken some of the most surprising exceptional bowling spells in the records of the national sport.

No matter how this prestigious tournament concludes, they have been, one after another, incredible, unbelievable, ridiculous, frustrating, and completely, unrepentantly, boldly entertaining.