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Nobody talks about the final delivery of the Ashes. That initial ball that's renowned. That stray ball that reaches the slip cordon, that cover drive for four, that wicket, bowled him! Final deliveries? I needed to check. Ali slicing a drive behind to conclude a batting effort rout in a meaningless match in 2015; Rankin being caught in the slips off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the fag-end of a quick disintegration in a clean sweep that's been full of them in 2014; a Steve Harmison rising delivery ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for runs, the sole boundary the Aussies manage in a run chase they'll not undertake in 2005.

It distinguishes between speculating how things will go, and seeing how they do. One certainty is, there's no guarantee there will be a happy ending. For the past ten years, the English Australian tours have ended in ashes, instead of with them. Andy Flower was removed as manager after one humiliating defeat, in 2013-14, Silverwood was sacked after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. You can make a two lineups out of England players who participated in their concluding Test match at the back end of an Australian tour during the past 25 years, and additionally have a few players over to serve as reserves for either side.

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 whether or not a aerial shot is taken at the rope matters less as whether or not it was the correct choice to execute it in the first place, and during play he's quick to praise a bowler who allows scoring shots so long as they help bring the team toward taking that following breakthrough. But then the very reason Ben Stokes tried to guide his players to follow this style was so they would be in a better position to produce the brand of the game he feels will do well for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been training rigorously, already appears as the conclusion they cannot escape. It is this bold strategy's critical moment. And there are an abundance of warnings of defeat in the national sport for the team to avoid backlash if they do suffer another poor loss in the next few weeks. The captain's strategy has been predicated on defying expectations, and the flipside is it feels as if there are plenty of people who would be pleased to be validated.

Considering this, it's a appropriate time to highlight that the crucial matter isn't just where this all ends up, but if we enjoyed it along the way. In the recent past, England were an thoroughly poor cricket team. They had been beaten in four consecutive series and were lagging in the fifth one, against India, when it was halted because of the virus. They had won exactly one Test match out of seventeen, and lost 12 of them by embarrassing margins. An eight-wicket defeat to New Zealand at Edgbaston, 157 runs to the Indian squad at the Oval, an innings and 14 runs to Australia at the MCG, A defeat by ten wickets to the Caribbean side in Grenada.

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

By the end, after all those periods of nasal swabs and preventive measures and biosecure bubbles and repeated losses at the hands of each rival, they were virtually the most miserable and exhausted Test team the English cricket board had ever fielded to a playing arena. A great deal of what Ben Stokes and McCullum have done in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the Stokes' personal encounters during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had endured a period of mental health challenges. It was created to make people recall that it was supposed to be enjoyable, if it was meant to be anything.

This continues to be the case now. Even when the the prestigious contest is on the line, and although the team have finally recognized that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they go about playing the game. Daily routines has a way of intruding, it can be difficult to hold on to the lessons we learn in our most difficult periods.

This is the England team that achieved successive fourth-innings chases of significant totals in one period against the Black Caps; that scored a huge total to defeat India that corresponding period; that became the first touring team to win a clean sweep in Pakistan; that fought back to a stalemate after going trailing by two matches in the the contest; that overcame India in the southern city off the back of one of the most remarkable knocks ever played in the the area, and then beat Pakistan in Multan off the back of a subsequent one.

This is the national side, too, that somehow end up being defeated in a Test by an innings defeat even though the rivals made a relatively low total; who concluded suffering a loss in one of the finer contests ever played after making a confident decision in the initial batting effort against New Zealand, and then did the same thing against the Australian team; who were thrashed by a huge margin in the Indian city, and who were on the wrong end of one of the island nation's most notable triumphs. Collectively, they have secured some of the most improbable victories, suffered some of the ugliest dismissals, achieved some of the surprising tons, and taken some of the most surprising five-wicket hauls in the history of English cricket.

No matter how this Ashes series concludes, they have been, successively, amazing, preposterous, ridiculous, infuriating, and entirely, unrepentantly, boldly entertaining.