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People rarely mention the last ball of the Ashes. That initial ball that's famous. That errant delivery that reaches the slip cordon, that elegant shot for four, that fallen stump, shattering the stumps! Last balls? I needed to check. Moeen Ali edging a shot behind to end an innings loss in a meaningless match in 2015; Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Harris, Boyd Rankin participating in his sole Test at the fag-end of a rapid downfall in a 5-0 whitewash that's been full of them in 2014; a Harmison rising delivery ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for extras, the single four Australia manage in a run chase they'll not attempt in 2005.

It distinguishes between questioning how things will go, and seeing how they do. One undeniable fact, there's no certainty there will be a successful conclusion. For the last decade, England's trips Down Under have concluded in failure, as opposed to with them. Flower was dismissed as manager after one humiliating defeat, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood lost his after a further defeat, in 2021-22. You can make a couple of teams out of England players who participated in their concluding Test match at the tail end of an Australian tour during the last quarter-century, and additionally have a few players over to act as substitutes for either side.

Stokes' squad have never claimed to care too much about outcomes. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, always says that whether or not a lofted drive is caught on the boundary isn't as important as whether or not it was the correct choice to play it in the beginning, and during play he's happy to clap a pitcher who allows scoring shots 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 follow this style was so they would be in a better position to produce the style of play he believes will do well for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been training rigorously, already seems like the outcome they cannot escape. It is this aggressive approach's decisive moment. And there are an abundance of predictions of failure in English cricket for the team to get away with it if they do endure a further bad defeat in the coming weeks. The captain's strategy has been founded on challenging skeptics, and the flipside is it feels as if there are plenty of people who would be thrilled to be shown right.

Given that, it's a appropriate time to highlight that the crucial matter is not only where this ultimately leads, but whether or not we had fun along the way. In the recent past, the English team were an utterly abject national side. They had been overcome in four straight contests and were falling behind in the final one, against the Indian team, when it was suspended because of Covid. They had won only one Test match out of seventeen, and lost twelve of them by humiliating deficits. A loss by eight wickets to New Zealand at the Birmingham ground, A defeat by 157 runs to the Indian squad at the the famous stadium, an a comprehensive loss to the Aussie team at Melbourne, A ten-wicket loss to the Caribbean side in Grenada.

The English side was routed by West Indies in Grenada in spring 2022 just before Root resigned as skipper.

By the conclusion, after all those months of health protocols and isolation and controlled settings and repeated losses at the hands of everyone they played, they were just about the most disheartened and exhausted Test team the English cricket board had ever sent out to a sports ground. A significant portion of what Stokes and Brendon McCullum have done in the years since was in response to all that, as well as the Stokes' personal encounters during his hiatus from the game in 2021 when he had suffered a series of panic attacks. It was created to make people recall that it was intended as fun, if it was intended as something.

That remains true now. Although the the historic series is on the line, and although the team have eventually come to agree that they need to be a slightly versatile in the way they go about performing. Everyday life has a way of crowding in, it can be challenging to remember the knowledge we acquire in our toughest times.

Here is the national side that peeled off back-to-back run chases of significant totals in one period against New Zealand; that scored a massive 378 to defeat the subcontinent giants that same summer; that became the first touring team to win a whitewash in the subcontinent country; that fought back to a stalemate after going two games behind in the the contest; that beat the Indian team in the southern city off the back of one of the most remarkable knocks ever played in the subcontinent, and then beat Pakistan in the location off the back of another.

It is the English squad, too, that somehow end up suffering a defeat 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 the Kiwis, and then did the same thing against Australia; who were soundly beaten by 434 runs in the Indian city, and who were on the unsuccessful part of one of the island nation's most notable triumphs. Between them, they have achieved some of the most improbable victories, suffered some of the poorest performances, scored some of the surprising centuries, and taken some of the most surprising five-fers in the annals of the national sport.

However this Ashes series unfolds, they have been, in turn, amazing, unbelievable, unconventional, infuriating, and completely, unrepentantly, unapologetically thrilling.