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Few recall the concluding moment of the Ashes. The opening delivery that's renowned. That errant delivery that reaches the slip cordon, that beautiful stroke for four, that wicket, shattering the stumps! Last balls? I needed to check. Moeen Ali cutting a stroke behind to end an innings rout in a meaningless match in 2015; Boyd Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Harris, Rankin playing in his single Test at the tail-end of a rapid downfall in a 5-0 whitewash that's been plentiful in 2014; a Steve Harmison short ball deflecting off Justin Langer's shoulder for four leg byes, the only four the Aussies manage in a target they'll never get to make in 2005.

It's the difference between wondering how things will go, and knowing how they do. One undeniable fact, there's no guarantee there will be a happy ending. For the previous decade, the English Australian tours have concluded in failure, rather than with them. Flower lost his job as coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood was sacked after another, in 2021-22. You can make a couple of teams out of English cricketers who played their last Test match at the conclusion of an tour to Australia during the last quarter-century, and still have a few players over to act as substitutes for both teams.

This England team have not professed to be overly concerned about consequences. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, always says that if a aerial shot is taken at the rope isn't as important as if it was the correct choice to play it in the outset, and while fielding he's happy to clap a pitcher who gives away boundaries so long as they help bring the team nearer to taking that next wicket. But then the key rationale Stokes tried to teach his team to follow this style was so they would be in a more advantageous state to deliver the brand of the game he thinks will perform effectively for them in Australia.

The forthcoming contest, for which they have been training rigorously, already feels like the result they cannot escape. It is this aggressive approach's decisive moment. And there are an abundance of warnings of defeat in the national sport for the team to escape criticism if they do experience another bad defeat in the next few weeks. The captain's strategy has been founded on challenging skeptics, and the flipside is it appears there are numerous observers who would be thrilled to be proven correct.

Considering this, it's a good moment to highlight that the key issue goes beyond where this ultimately leads, but whether or not we enjoyed it along the way. Four years ago, England were an thoroughly poor cricket team. They had been beaten in a quartet of successive tournaments and were falling behind in the fifth, against the Indian team, when it was suspended because of Covid. They had won a single Test match out of seventeen, and lost a dozen of them by humiliating deficits. A loss by eight wickets to the Black Caps at Edgbaston, A defeat by 157 runs to the Indian squad at the the famous stadium, an an innings defeat to the Australians at the MCG, 10 wickets to West Indies in the island nation.

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

By the end, after all those months of testing and preventive measures and biosecure bubbles and constant defeats at the hands of everyone they played, they were virtually the most disheartened and weary Test team England had ever fielded to a sports ground. A great deal of what Stokes and Brendon McCullum have achieved in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the former's experiences during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a bout of anxiety. It was created to emphasize to all that it was meant to be fun, if it was intended as anything.

That remains true now. Although the Ashes is on the line, and regardless if the team have eventually come to agree that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they go about competing. Everyday life has a way of imposing, it can be hard to retain the knowledge we acquire in our toughest times.

This is the England team that secured successive run chases of three challenging targets in one period against the Black Caps; that achieved a huge total to defeat India that same summer; that became the first touring team to win a whitewash in Pakistan; that showed resilience to a draw after going two games behind in the Ashes; that overcame the Indian team in the historic venue off the back of one of the greatest innings ever played in the the region, and then beat Pakistan in the city off the back of a further exceptional performance.

Here we have the England team, too, that unexpectedly end up being defeated in a Test by an large margin even though the rivals made a relatively low total; who ended up suffering a loss in one of the better Tests ever staged after making a cocksure declaration in the initial batting effort against the Kiwis, and then followed suit against the Aussies; who were soundly beaten by 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of the Sri Lankan team's most notable triumphs. As a unit, they have recorded some of the most improbable victories, experienced some of the poorest performances, scored some of the surprising centuries, and achieved some of the most remarkable exceptional bowling spells in the annals of the English game.

No matter how this prestigious tournament concludes, they have been, successively, amazing, unbelievable, ridiculous, frustrating, and totally, unapologetically, unapologetically entertaining.