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Few recall the concluding moment of the Ashes. It's the first that's legendary. That wide that reaches the slip cordon, that elegant shot for four, that wicket, clean bowled! Final deliveries? I had to look them up. Ali slicing a drive behind to finish an innings defeat in a dead rubber in 2015; Boyd Rankin being caught in the slips off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the tail-end of a rapid downfall in a comprehensive defeat that's been plentiful in 2014; a Harmison rising delivery glancing off Langer's shoulder for runs, the only four Australia achieve in a run chase they'll never get to make 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 positive outcome. For the past ten years, the English trips Down Under have finished in defeat, instead of with them. Flower was dismissed as coach after one humiliating defeat, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood was sacked after a further defeat, in 2021-22. You can make a two lineups out of national team members who participated in their concluding Test match at the conclusion of an Australian tour during the last quarter-century, and even have a few players over to carry the drinks for either side.

The current English side have not asserted to care too much about results. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the ODI squad before him, always says that if a aerial shot is caught on the boundary is secondary as if it was the correct choice to attempt it in the beginning, and while fielding he's quick to praise a pitcher who concedes runs so long as they are bringing the team closer to taking that next wicket. But then the primary motive Stokes tried to instruct his squad to play this way was so they would be in a more advantageous state to execute the brand of the game he thinks will perform effectively for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been preparing for so long, already appears as the outcome they can't get away from. It is this bold strategy's decisive moment. And there are numerous predictions of failure in the national sport for the team to escape criticism if they do endure a further poor loss in the coming weeks. Stokes's approach has been founded on defying expectations, and the counterpart is it feels as if there are plenty of people who would be pleased to be shown right.

Considering this, it's a appropriate time to highlight that the key issue is not only where this ultimately leads, but if we found pleasure along the way. A few years back, England were an thoroughly poor sports team. They had been overcome in a quartet of successive tournaments and were falling behind in the fifth one, against the Indian team, when it was suspended because of the pandemic. They had won only one Test match out of seventeen, and lost a dozen of them by humiliating deficits. A loss by eight wickets to the Kiwis at the Birmingham ground, 157 runs to the Indian squad at the the famous stadium, an innings and 14 runs to the Aussie team at the iconic ground, A defeat by ten wickets to West Indies in Grenada.

The English side was routed by the Windies in the venue in spring 2022 just before Root resigned as captain.

By the final stage, after all those months of nasal swabs and social distancing and controlled settings and repeated losses at the hands of all opponents, they were practically the most disheartened and exhausted Test team England had ever put on to a sports ground. A significant portion of what Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have accomplished in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the Stokes' experiences during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a series of panic attacks. It was created to remind everyone that it was intended as enjoyable, if it was meant to be anything at all.

This continues to be the case now. Although the the prestigious contest is on the line, and even if the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they go about performing. Everyday life has a way of crowding in, it can be hard to remember the lessons we learn in our toughest times.

This is the national side that peeled off consecutive run chases of 277, 299, and 296 in one season against the Kiwis; that made a massive 378 to beat the Indian team that corresponding period; that became the pioneering away squad to win a whitewash in Pakistan; that battled hard to a draw after going 2-0 down in the Ashes; that beat the Indian team in Hyderabad off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever played in the subcontinent, and then defeated Pakistan in the city off the back of a subsequent one.

Here we have the English squad, too, that somehow end up suffering a defeat in a Test by an innings defeat even though the other team made a relatively low total; who fetched up losing one of the better Tests ever contested after making a cocksure declaration in the first innings against the Kiwis, and then followed suit against the Australian team; who were soundly beaten by a huge margin in the Indian city, and who were on the losing side of one of the island nation's finest wins. As a unit, they have achieved some of the surprising successes, experienced some of the ugliest dismissals, achieved some of the unlikeliest hundreds, and taken some of the most startling exceptional bowling spells in the annals of the English game.

However this Ashes series unfolds, they have been, in turn, astonishing, unbelievable, ridiculous, frustrating, and totally, unapologetically, unashamedly enjoyable.