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Nobody talks about the concluding moment of the Ashes. The opening delivery that's famous. That errant delivery that goes to the slips, that cover drive for four, that wicket, bowled him! Final deliveries? I needed to check. Ali cutting a stroke behind to finish an innings defeat in a meaningless match in 2015; Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Harris, Rankin featuring in his sole Test at the conclusion of a quick disintegration in a 5-0 whitewash that's been full of them in 2014; a Steve Harmison rising delivery ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for runs, the single four the Australian team manage in a target they'll never get to make in 2005.

It distinguishes between questioning how things will go, and seeing how they do. One thing's certain, there's no certainty there will be a happy ending. For the previous decade, England's trips Down Under have finished in defeat, rather than with them. Andy Flower was dismissed as manager after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood was sacked after another, in 2021-22. You can make a two lineups out of England players who played their last Test match at the back end of an trip Down Under during the previous 25 years, and even have a few players over to act as substitutes for each squad.

The current English side have never claimed to worry excessively about outcomes. Ben Stokes, like Morgan with the ODI squad before him, consistently states that regardless of whether a aerial shot is grabbed near the fence is secondary as if it was the proper call to execute it in the first place, and in the field he's happy to clap a bowler who allows scoring shots so long as they bringing the team nearer to taking that subsequent dismissal. But then the primary motive Stokes tried to teach his team to follow this style was so they would be in a superior situation to execute the brand of the game he feels will succeed for them in Australia.

The upcoming Ashes, for which they have been preparing for so long, already seems like the outcome they cannot escape. It is Bazball's critical moment. And there are too many warnings of defeat in the English game for the team to escape criticism if they do endure a further disappointing result in the coming weeks. His methodology has been founded on challenging skeptics, and the flipside is it seems that there are numerous observers who would be pleased to be validated.

Given that, it's a suitable occasion to highlight that the key issue isn't just where this concludes, but regardless of whether we had fun along the way. A few years back, England were an utterly abject national side. They had been defeated in four straight contests and were trailing in the fifth, against India, when it was halted because of the virus. They had won exactly one Test match out of a series of 17, and lost 12 of them by embarrassing margins. Eight wickets to the Kiwis at Edgbaston, 157 runs to the subcontinent team at the Oval, an a comprehensive loss to the Australians at the iconic ground, 10 wickets to the Windies in Grenada.

The English side was routed by the Windies in the island in spring 2022 just before Joe Root resigned as skipper.

By the end, after all those periods of health protocols and isolation and restricted environments and endless beatings at the hands of all opponents, they were practically the most disheartened and exhausted Test team the English cricket board had ever sent out to a sports ground. So much of what Stokes and Brendon McCullum have done in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the Stokes' personal encounters during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had endured a bout of anxiety. It was intended to remind everyone that it was intended as entertaining, if it was meant to be anything at all.

That remains true now. Despite when the the prestigious contest is on the line, and regardless if the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they approach performing. Daily routines has a way of imposing, it can be difficult to remember the knowledge we acquire in our most difficult periods.

Here is the English squad that achieved successive fourth-innings chases of three challenging targets in one period against the Black Caps; that scored a massive 378 to defeat India that identical season; that became the first touring team to win a comprehensive victory in Pakistan; that showed resilience to a tie after going trailing by two matches in the the series; that beat India in the historic venue off the back of one of the greatest innings ever performed in the subcontinent, and then defeated Pakistan in the location off the back of a further exceptional performance.

This is the national side, too, that managed to end up being defeated in a Test by an innings even though the opposition made a relatively low total; who concluded losing one of the better Tests ever contested after making a bold declaration in the opening session against the Black Caps, and then repeated the action against the Aussies; who were thrashed by 434 runs in the venue, and who were on the losing side of one of Sri Lanka's finest wins. Between them, they have recorded some of the most improbable victories, endured some of the most embarrassing exits, made some of the unlikeliest centuries, and taken some of the most startling exceptional bowling spells in the records of the English game.

However this Ashes series concludes, they have been, one after another, amazing, unbelievable, unconventional, exasperating, and totally, without regret, boldly entertaining.