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Nobody talks about the final delivery of the Ashes. The opening delivery that's renowned. That wide that flies to slip, that cover drive for four, that dismissal, shattering the stumps! Last balls? I needed to check. Ali edging a shot behind to end an innings loss in a dead rubber in 2015; Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the tail-end of a quick disintegration in a comprehensive defeat that's been commonplace in 2014; a Harmison rising delivery ricocheting away Justin Langer's shoulder for four leg byes, the single four the Aussies achieve in a target they'll never get to make in 2005.

It separates between questioning how things will go, and seeing how they do. One thing's certain, there's no certainty there will be a happy ending. For the previous decade, the English trips Down Under have concluded in failure, as opposed to with them. Flower lost his job as head coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood was sacked after a further defeat, in 2021-22. One could assemble a pair of XIs out of England players who featured in their final Test match at the tail end of an Australian tour during the past 25 years, and additionally have a several individuals over to serve as reserves for either side.

Stokes' squad have never claimed to care too much about results. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the ODI squad before him, consistently states that whether or not a aerial shot is grabbed near the fence matters less as whether it was the correct choice to attempt it in the first place, and in the field he's quick to praise a bowler who gives away boundaries so long as they bringing the team closer to taking that next wicket. But then the key rationale Ben Stokes tried to guide his players to adopt this approach was so they would be in a more advantageous state to produce the kind of cricket he feels will perform effectively for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been training rigorously, already feels like the result they are bound to face. It is this aggressive approach's critical moment. And there are an abundance of “I told you so’s” in the national sport for the team to get away with it if they do experience another poor loss in the next few weeks. His methodology has been predicated on challenging skeptics, and the flipside is it seems that there are many individuals who would be pleased to be proven correct.

Considering this, it's a good moment to highlight that the important question is not only where this concludes, but if we had fun along the way. A few years back, the English team were an thoroughly poor national side. They had been beaten in a quartet of successive tournaments and were lagging in the fifth, against the Indian team, when it was postponed because of the virus. They had won exactly one Test match out of a series of 17, and lost 12 of them by embarrassing margins. A loss by eight wickets to New Zealand at the Birmingham ground, 157 runs to the subcontinent team at the the famous stadium, an an innings defeat to the Aussie team at the MCG, 10 wickets to West Indies in the island nation.

The English side was routed by the Windies in the venue in the early part of 2022 just before Root resigned as leader.

By the conclusion, after all those periods of health protocols and preventive measures and controlled settings and repeated losses at the hands of everyone they played, they were virtually the most miserable and exhausted Test team the English cricket board had ever fielded to a cricket field. A significant portion of what Stokes and Brendon McCullum have done in the subsequent years was in response to all that, as well as the Stokes' individual trials during his time away from the game in 2021 when he had endured a bout of anxiety. It was intended to make people recall that it was intended as fun, if it was meant to be anything at all.

That remains true now. Although the the prestigious contest is on the line, and although the team have finally recognized that they need to be a slightly versatile in the way they tackle performing. Daily routines has a way of imposing, it can be difficult to remember the insights we gain in our lowest moments.

This is the England team that achieved consecutive final innings pursuits of three challenging targets in one summer against the Black Caps; that made a massive 378 to beat the Indian team that corresponding period; that became the first touring team to win a comprehensive victory in the host nation; that battled hard to a stalemate after going two games behind in the the series; that defeated the Indian team in the southern city off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever performed in the subcontinent, and then beat Pakistan in the location off the back of a further exceptional performance.

It is the English squad, too, that unexpectedly end up losing a Test by an innings defeat even though the other team made only 326; who fetched up suffering a loss in one of the better Tests ever staged after making a cocksure declaration in the opening session against New Zealand, and then did the same thing against the Aussies; who were routed by a massive 434 runs in the Indian city, and who were on the losing side of one of the island nation's finest wins. Collectively, they have recorded some of the unlikeliest wins, experienced some of the ugliest dismissals, achieved some of the surprising centuries, and taken some of the most remarkable five-fers in the records of the English game.

No matter how this Ashes series unfolds, they have been, successively, astonishing, unbelievable, unconventional, frustrating, and entirely, without regret, unapologetically thrilling.