Ben Stokes' team have shown the world that cricket is meant to be fun.
People rarely mention the final delivery of the Ashes. That initial ball that's legendary. That wide that flies to slip, that elegant shot for four, that dismissal, shattering the stumps! Last balls? I had to look them up. Ali edging a shot behind to finish an innings defeat in a meaningless match in 2015; Rankin being taken at slip off Harris, Rankin participating in his one and only Test at the tail-end of a quick disintegration in a clean sweep that's been plentiful in 2014; a Harmison bouncer ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for four leg byes, the only four the Aussies achieve in a target they'll not undertake in 2005.
It distinguishes 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 past ten years, the English Australian tours have concluded in failure, rather than with them. Flower was removed as head coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood lost his after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. You can make a couple of teams out of national team members who featured in their final Test match at the back end of an tour to Australia during the last quarter-century, and even have a few players over to serve as reserves for both teams.
Stokes' squad have not professed to worry excessively about outcomes. Stokes, like Morgan with the one-day side before him, consistently states that regardless of whether a aerial shot is caught on the boundary is secondary as whether or not it was the proper call to execute it in the outset, and while fielding he's quick to praise a bowler who gives away boundaries so long as they are bringing the team nearer to taking that subsequent dismissal. But then the key rationale Stokes tried to instruct his squad to adopt this approach was so they would be in a more advantageous state to deliver the style of play he thinks will do well for them in Australia.
The forthcoming contest, for which they have been training rigorously, already feels like the conclusion they can't get away from. It is Bazball's make or break moment. And there are an abundance of predictions of failure in English cricket for the team to get away with it if they do suffer another poor loss in the coming weeks. His methodology has been based on proving everyone wrong, and the other side is it feels as if there are many individuals who would be thrilled to be proven correct.
Given that, it's a good moment to highlight that the key issue isn't just where this ultimately leads, but whether or not we enjoyed it along the way. Four years ago, the English team were an utterly abject cricket team. They had been defeated in a quartet of successive tournaments and were trailing in the final one, against India, when it was halted because of the virus. They had won only one Test match out of 17, and lost a dozen of them by large defeats. An eight-wicket defeat to the Kiwis at Edgbaston, 157 runs to India at the Oval, an an innings defeat to Australia at the iconic ground, 10 wickets to the Caribbean side in the island nation.
The team was soundly beaten by the Windies in Grenada in March 2022 just before Joe Root resigned as leader.
By the end, after all those stretches of health protocols and preventive measures and controlled settings and repeated losses at the hands of each rival, they were just about the most miserable and careworn Test team the English cricket board had ever sent out to a cricket field. So much of what Ben Stokes and McCullum have done in the subsequent years was in response to all that, as well as the former's personal encounters during his hiatus from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a series of panic attacks. It was created to make people recall that it was intended as entertaining, if it was supposed to be anything at all.
This continues to be the case now. Despite when the the prestigious contest is on the line, and regardless if the team have eventually come to agree that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they approach competing. Normal existence has a way of imposing, it can be challenging to retain the insights we gain in our most difficult periods.
Presented is the national side that peeled off successive run chases of three challenging targets in one period against the Kiwis; that achieved a massive 378 to overcome the subcontinent giants that corresponding period; that became the initial visiting side to win a comprehensive victory in the host nation; that fought back to a stalemate after going trailing by two matches in the Ashes; that defeated India in the historic venue off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever performed in the the region, and then beat Pakistan in the city off the back of a further exceptional performance.
This is the national side, too, that unexpectedly end up being defeated in a Test by an innings even though the rivals made a relatively low total; who ended up suffering a loss in one of the finer contests ever staged after making a cocksure declaration in the first innings against New Zealand, and then followed suit against the Australian team; who were routed by a massive 434 runs in the Indian city, and who were on the wrong end of one of Sri Lanka's greatest victories. As a unit, they have achieved some of the most improbable victories, suffered some of the ugliest dismissals, scored some of the unlikeliest hundreds, and achieved some of the most startling exceptional bowling spells in the annals of English cricket.
Regardless of how this Ashes series unfolds, they have been, in turn, amazing, preposterous, ridiculous, frustrating, and completely, without regret, unashamedly enjoyable.