Ben Stokes' team have shown everyone that this great game is all about entertainment.

People rarely mention the final delivery of the Ashes. The opening delivery that's legendary. That errant delivery that flies to slip, that beautiful stroke for four, that wicket, shattering the stumps! Concluding moments? I needed to check. Moeen Ali slicing a drive behind to end an innings loss in a dead rubber in 2015; Rankin being taken at slip off Ryan Harris, Rankin featuring in his one and only Test at the fag-end of a rapid downfall in a 5-0 whitewash that's been plentiful in 2014; a Harmison bouncer glancing off Langer's shoulder for four leg byes, the only four Australia achieve in a run chase they'll not attempt in 2005.

It separates between speculating how things will go, and knowing how they do. One certainty is, there's no assurance there will be a positive outcome. For the past ten years, England's Australian tours have concluded in failure, rather than with them. Andy Flower lost his job as coach after a crushing loss, in 2013-14, Silverwood was sacked after another, in 2021-22. You can make a pair of XIs out of England players who participated in their concluding Test match at the back end of an tour to Australia during the last quarter-century, and additionally have a several individuals over to carry the drinks for either side.

This England team have not professed to care too much about outcomes. Ben Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the ODI squad before him, always says that whether or not a lofted drive is grabbed near the fence isn't as important as whether it was the correct choice to execute it in the first place, and in the field he's quick to praise a pitcher who allows scoring shots so long as they bringing the team closer to taking that next wicket. But then the very reason Stokes tried to guide his players to follow this style was so they would be in a superior situation to deliver the brand of the game he thinks will perform effectively for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, for which they have been training rigorously, already seems like the result they cannot escape. It is this bold strategy's decisive moment. And there are too many warnings of defeat in English cricket for the team to escape criticism if they do suffer another poor loss in the next few weeks. His methodology has been predicated on defying expectations, and the counterpart is it seems that there are plenty of people who would be delighted to be proven correct.

Given that, it's a appropriate time to highlight that the crucial matter goes beyond where this ultimately leads, but regardless of whether we found pleasure along the way. In the recent past, England were an utterly abject sports team. They had been overcome in four consecutive series and were lagging in the fifth, against India, when it was suspended because of Covid. They had won exactly one Test match out of 17, and lost 12 of them by embarrassing margins. A loss by eight wickets to the Black Caps at Edgbaston, A 157-run loss to the Indian squad at the the famous stadium, an innings and 14 runs to the Australians at Melbourne, 10 wickets to West Indies in the scenic location.

The team was soundly beaten by the Windies in Grenada in the early part of 2022 just before Root resigned as skipper.

By the conclusion, after all those months of nasal swabs and isolation and biosecure bubbles and endless beatings at the hands of all opponents, they were virtually the most miserable and exhausted Test team England had ever put on to a cricket field. A significant portion of what Stokes and McCullum have accomplished in the following period 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 endured a series of panic attacks. It was intended to emphasize to all that it was supposed to be entertaining, if it was supposed to be something.

It still is now. Despite when the the prestigious contest is on the line, and even if the team have finally recognized that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they tackle performing. Normal existence has a way of crowding in, it can be difficult to retain the lessons we learn in our toughest times.

Here is the English squad that achieved successive fourth-innings chases of significant totals in one period against New Zealand; that scored a massive 378 to overcome the Indian team that identical season; that became the pioneering away squad to win a comprehensive victory in Pakistan; that battled hard to a stalemate after going 2-0 down in the the contest; that beat India in Hyderabad off the back of one of the most remarkable knocks ever played in the subcontinent, and then defeated the Pakistani team in the location off the back of a further exceptional performance.

Here we have the England team, too, that somehow end up being defeated in a Test by an innings defeat even though the opposition made a modest 326; who fetched up suffering a loss in one of the finer contests ever played after making a bold declaration in the opening session against the Kiwis, and then followed suit against the Australian team; who were thrashed by a huge margin in the Indian city, and who were on the losing side of one of the island nation's finest wins. Collectively, they have achieved some of the surprising successes, suffered some of the most embarrassing exits, scored some of the surprising hundreds, and achieved some of the most startling five-fers in the history of the national sport.

Regardless of how this prestigious tournament concludes, they have been, successively, astonishing, preposterous, absurd, exasperating, and totally, without regret, unashamedly thrilling.