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People rarely mention the last ball of the Ashes. It's the first that's famous. That errant delivery that goes to the slips, that beautiful stroke for four, that wicket, shattering the stumps! Last balls? I had to look them up. Moeen Ali slicing a drive behind to end an innings defeat in a dead rubber in 2015; Boyd Rankin being caught in the slips off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin participating in his sole Test at the conclusion of a 30-over collapse in a clean sweep that's been commonplace in 2014; a Harmison short ball deflecting off Justin Langer's shoulder for extras, the sole boundary the Australian team achieve in a run chase they'll not undertake in 2005.

It distinguishes between questioning how things will go, and knowing how they do. One undeniable fact, there's no certainty there will be a happy ending. For the last decade, England's trips Down Under have concluded in failure, instead of with them. Flower lost his job as coach after one humiliating defeat, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood lost his after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. You can make a pair of XIs out of English cricketers who played their last Test match at the conclusion of an Australian tour during the last quarter-century, and still have a couple of men over to serve as reserves for either side.

Stokes' squad have not professed to worry excessively about outcomes. Ben Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, frequently remarks that if a aerial shot is caught on the boundary matters less as if it was the correct choice to play it in the beginning, and while fielding he's pleased to applaud a pitcher who gives away boundaries so long as they are bringing the team nearer to taking that following breakthrough. But then the key rationale Ben Stokes tried to teach his team to follow this style was so they would be in a more advantageous state to execute the brand of the game he feels will succeed for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been planning extensively, already appears as the result they are bound to face. It is this aggressive approach's critical moment. And there are numerous “I told you so’s” in English cricket for the team to avoid backlash if they do experience another poor loss in the coming weeks. His methodology has been predicated on defying expectations, and the counterpart is it appears there are many individuals who would be pleased to be proven correct.

Given that, it's a appropriate time to highlight that the important question goes beyond where this ultimately leads, but regardless of whether we had fun along the way. In the recent past, the English team were an completely dismal sports team. They had been beaten in a quartet of successive tournaments and were trailing in the final one, against the Indian team, when it was halted because of Covid. They had won a single Test match out of 17, and lost 12 of them by large defeats. Eight wickets to New Zealand at the Birmingham ground, A defeat by 157 runs to the subcontinent team at the the London ground, an innings and 14 runs to the Australians at the MCG, A defeat by ten wickets to the Caribbean side in Grenada.

The English side was routed by West Indies in the island in spring 2022 just before Root stepped down as leader.

By the conclusion, after all those months of nasal swabs and preventive measures and biosecure bubbles and repeated losses at the hands of everyone they played, they were practically the most miserable and careworn Test team England had ever put on to a playing arena. A great deal of what Ben Stokes and McCullum have done in the years since was in response to all that, as well as the Stokes' personal encounters during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a series of panic attacks. It was created to emphasize to all that it was meant to be entertaining, if it was intended as anything.

That remains true now. Although the the historic series is on the line, and although the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they go about performing. Everyday life has a way of intruding, it can be challenging to hold on to the insights we gain in our toughest times.

This is the England team that peeled off back-to-back run chases of three challenging targets in one summer against the Kiwis; that achieved a huge total to defeat the subcontinent giants that corresponding period; that became the pioneering away squad to win a comprehensive victory in the subcontinent country; that battled hard to a stalemate after going two games behind in the Ashes; that defeated the Indian team in the southern city off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever performed in the the region, and then defeated the Pakistani team in Multan off the back of a subsequent one.

Here we have the England team, too, that somehow end up suffering a defeat in a Test by an large margin even though the opposition made a relatively low total; who concluded being defeated in one of the more exciting matches ever played after making a cocksure declaration in the opening session against the Kiwis, and then did the same thing against the Aussies; who were routed by 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of the Sri Lankan team's most notable triumphs. Collectively, they have achieved some of the unlikeliest wins, endured some of the poorest performances, scored some of the most improbable tons, and secured some of the most surprising exceptional bowling spells in the history of the national sport.

Regardless of how this Ashes series shakes out, they have been, successively, amazing, unbelievable, ridiculous, infuriating, and completely, without regret, unashamedly thrilling.