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People rarely mention the concluding moment of the Ashes. That initial ball that's famous. That wide that reaches the slip cordon, that elegant shot for four, that fallen stump, clean bowled! Last balls? I had to look them up. Ali slicing a drive behind to finish an innings loss in a meaningless match in 2015; Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Ryan Harris, Rankin participating in his one and only Test at the conclusion of a quick disintegration in a clean sweep that's been plentiful in 2014; a Harmison short ball ricocheting away Justin Langer's shoulder for extras, the only four the Australian team achieve in a run chase they'll never get to make in 2005.

It separates between speculating how things will go, and seeing how they do. One certainty is, there's no assurance there will be a successful conclusion. For the last decade, England's visits to Australia have ended in ashes, as opposed to with them. Flower lost his job as coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood was let go after another, in 2021-22. You can make a pair of XIs out of national team members who featured in their final Test match at the conclusion of an trip Down Under during the past 25 years, and still have a couple of men over to serve as reserves for each squad.

This England team have never claimed to care too much about consequences. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, frequently remarks that whether or not a lofted drive is caught on the boundary isn't as important as whether it was the correct choice to attempt it in the beginning, and while fielding he's pleased to applaud a pitcher who concedes runs so long as they are bringing the team nearer to taking that subsequent dismissal. But then the very reason Ben Stokes tried to instruct his squad to adopt this approach was so they would be in a superior situation to produce the brand of the game he believes will succeed for them in Australia.

The forthcoming contest, for which they have been planning extensively, already seems like the outcome they can't get away from. It is this bold strategy's decisive moment. And there are too many predictions of failure in the national sport for the team to get away with it if they do endure a further poor loss in the next few weeks. Stokes's approach has been founded on proving everyone wrong, and the other side is it seems that there are numerous observers who would be pleased to be validated.

Given that, it's a suitable occasion to point out that the important question isn't just where this all ends up, but if we had fun along the way. In the recent past, England were an thoroughly poor sports team. They had been defeated in a quartet of successive tournaments and were lagging in the final one, against the Indian team, when it was postponed because of Covid. They had won a single Test match out of seventeen, and lost twelve of them by large defeats. A loss by eight wickets to New Zealand at the Birmingham ground, A defeat by 157 runs to the Indian squad at the the London ground, an a comprehensive loss to Australia at the iconic ground, A ten-wicket loss to the Windies in Grenada.

The team was soundly beaten by the Windies in the island in the early part of 2022 just before Joe Root stepped aside as leader.

By the final stage, after all those periods of health protocols and isolation and restricted environments and endless beatings at the hands of all opponents, they were virtually the most disheartened and weary Test team the English cricket board had ever fielded to a sports ground. A great deal of what Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have achieved in the years since was in response to all that, as well as the Stokes' personal encounters during his time away from the game in 2021 when he had suffered a series of panic attacks. It was designed to emphasize to all that it was supposed to be entertaining, if it was intended as something.

That remains true now. Even when the Ashes is on the line, and although the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they approach performing. Everyday life has a way of crowding in, it can be hard to hold on to the knowledge we acquire in our toughest times.

This is the English squad that achieved successive fourth-innings chases of three challenging targets in one season against New Zealand; that made a massive 378 to overcome the subcontinent giants that corresponding period; that became the initial visiting side to win a comprehensive victory in the host nation; that fought back to a stalemate after going two games behind in the the series; that overcame India in Hyderabad off the back of one of the greatest innings ever executed in the the region, and then beat the Pakistani team in the city off the back of a subsequent one.

Here we have the English squad, too, that unexpectedly end up being defeated in a Test by an innings even though the opposition made only 326; who fetched up suffering a loss in one of the finer contests ever staged after making a cocksure declaration in the first innings against the Kiwis, and then did the same thing against the Aussies; who were routed by a huge margin in the Indian city, and who were on the losing side of one of the island nation's most notable triumphs. As a unit, they have achieved some of the surprising successes, experienced some of the poorest performances, made some of the surprising hundreds, and achieved some of the most surprising five-fers in the annals of the English game.

Regardless of how this prestigious tournament shakes out, they have been, successively, amazing, unbelievable, absurd, exasperating, and entirely, unrepentantly, boldly entertaining.