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People rarely mention the last ball of the Ashes. That initial ball that's famous. That errant delivery that goes to the slips, that beautiful stroke for four, that dismissal, clean bowled! Final deliveries? I needed to check. Ali edging a shot behind to end an innings rout in a inconsequential game in 2015; Rankin being caught in the slips off Harris, Rankin participating in his one and only Test at the fag-end of a rapid downfall in a comprehensive defeat that's been plentiful in 2014; a Harmison short ball ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for four leg byes, the only four the Australian team manage in a run chase they'll not attempt in 2005.

It separates between questioning how things will go, and understanding how they do. One certainty is, there's no guarantee there will be a successful conclusion. For the last decade, the English trips Down Under have finished in defeat, rather than with them. Andy Flower was removed as manager after a crushing loss, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood lost his after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. You can make a pair of XIs out of national team members who featured in their final Test match at the back end of an tour to Australia during the previous 25 years, and still have a few players over to serve as reserves for both teams.

The current English side have not asserted to worry excessively about results. Stokes, like Morgan with the one-day side before him, always says that whether or not a lifted stroke is taken at the rope matters less as whether or not it was the right decision to play it in the first place, and in the field he's quick to praise a bowler who gives away boundaries so long as they are bringing the team closer to taking that following breakthrough. But then the key rationale Ben Stokes tried to teach his team to adopt this approach was so they would be in a more advantageous state to produce the style of play he believes will do well for them in Australia.

The upcoming Ashes, 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 too many warnings of defeat in the national sport for the team to escape criticism if they do suffer another disappointing result in the next few weeks. His methodology has been predicated on proving everyone wrong, and the counterpart is it appears there are plenty of people who would be pleased to be shown right.

Considering this, it's a good moment to emphasize that the key issue isn't just where this concludes, but regardless of whether we had fun along the way. In the recent past, the English team were an utterly abject national side. They had been defeated in four consecutive series and were lagging in the fifth one, against the Indian team, when it was postponed because of Covid. They had won a single Test match out of a series of 17, and lost twelve of them by humiliating deficits. An eight-wicket defeat to the Black Caps at the historic venue, A defeat by 157 runs to India at the Oval, an innings and 14 runs to Australia at Melbourne, A ten-wicket loss to the Caribbean side in the scenic location.

The English side was routed by the Caribbean team in Grenada in spring 2022 just before Root stepped aside as leader.

By the conclusion, after all those months of health protocols and social distancing and restricted environments and repeated losses at the hands of all opponents, they were just about the most miserable and careworn Test team England had ever sent out to a sports ground. A great deal of what Ben Stokes and McCullum have achieved in the following period was in response to all that, as well as the Stokes' experiences during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had suffered a period of mental health challenges. It was designed to emphasize to all that it was intended as enjoyable, if it was meant to be anything.

This continues to be the case now. Despite when the the historic series is on the line, and even if the team have eventually come to agree that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they approach competing. Everyday life has a way of imposing, it can be hard to hold on to the knowledge we acquire in our most difficult periods.

This is the English squad that peeled off successive fourth-innings chases of significant totals in one season against the Kiwis; that scored 378 to defeat the Indian team that corresponding period; that became the first touring team to win a whitewash in the host nation; that fought back to a draw after going trailing by two matches in the Ashes; that defeated India in the southern city off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever executed in the subcontinent, and then beat Pakistan 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 large margin even though the rivals made a modest 326; who ended up losing one of the better Tests ever played after making a confident decision in the initial batting effort against the Kiwis, and then repeated the action against Australia; who were routed by a huge margin in Rajkot, and who were on the losing side of one of Sri Lanka's finest wins. Between them, they have achieved some of the most improbable victories, suffered some of the poorest performances, scored some of the unlikeliest centuries, and achieved some of the most startling five-fers in the records of the national sport.

Regardless of how this prestigious tournament unfolds, they have been, one after another, amazing, preposterous, absurd, exasperating, and entirely, unapologetically, unashamedly entertaining.