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Few recall the concluding moment of the Ashes. The opening delivery that's famous. That stray ball that reaches the slip cordon, that cover drive for four, that dismissal, clean bowled! Concluding moments? I had to look them up. Moeen Ali slicing a drive behind to finish an innings loss in a meaningless match in 2015; Boyd Rankin being taken at slip off Harris, Rankin playing in his single Test at the tail-end of a rapid downfall in a comprehensive defeat that's been commonplace in 2014; a Steve Harmison bouncer glancing off Langer's shoulder for extras, the sole boundary the Australian team score in a pursuit they'll not attempt in 2005.

It distinguishes between speculating how things will go, and knowing how they do. One certainty is, there's no guarantee there will be a positive outcome. For the past ten years, the English Australian tours have concluded in failure, as opposed to with them. Flower was dismissed as head coach after one humiliating defeat, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood was sacked after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. You can make a two lineups out of England players who played their last Test match at the tail end of an Australian tour during the previous 25 years, and additionally have a few players over to act as substitutes for both teams.

The current English side have not professed to worry excessively about outcomes. Stokes, like Morgan with the limited-overs team before him, always says that whether or not a aerial shot is grabbed near the fence matters less as if it was the right decision to attempt it in the outset, and while fielding he's happy to clap a pitcher who allows scoring shots so long as they help bring the team closer to taking that subsequent dismissal. But then the key rationale Ben Stokes tried to teach his team to adopt this approach was so they would be in a better position to deliver the kind of cricket he feels will perform effectively for them in Australia.

The forthcoming contest, for which they have been planning extensively, already seems like the conclusion they can't get away from. It is this bold strategy's make or break moment. And there are too many “I told you so’s” in the English game for the team to escape criticism if they do endure a further poor loss in the next few weeks. Stokes's approach has been founded on challenging skeptics, and the other side is it feels as if there are numerous observers who would be delighted to be shown right.

Given that, it's a good moment to point out that the important question isn't just where this ultimately leads, but regardless of whether we found pleasure along the way. Four years ago, the English team were an completely dismal national side. They had been beaten in a quartet of successive tournaments and were trailing in the final one, against the Indian team, when it was postponed because of the pandemic. They had won a single Test match out of 17, and lost twelve of them by humiliating deficits. A loss by eight wickets to the Black Caps at the Birmingham ground, A 157-run loss to India at the Oval, an innings and 14 runs to Australia at the MCG, 10 wickets to West Indies in the island nation.

England were thrashed by West Indies in the island in the early part of 2022 just before Root resigned as skipper.

By the end, after all those periods of testing and isolation and biosecure bubbles and endless beatings at the hands of all opponents, they were practically the most disheartened and careworn Test team England had ever put on to a sports ground. So much of what Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have accomplished in the years since was in a consequence of all that, as well as the Stokes' experiences during his hiatus from the game in 2021 when he had suffered a bout of anxiety. It was intended to remind everyone that it was meant to be fun, if it was meant to be something.

This continues to be the case now. Although the the historic series 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 approach competing. Daily routines has a way of crowding in, it can be hard to remember the knowledge we acquire in our toughest times.

Presented is the national side that achieved back-to-back fourth-innings chases of significant totals in one summer against the Kiwis; that scored a huge total to beat the subcontinent giants that same summer; that became the first touring team to win a comprehensive victory in Pakistan; that battled hard to a stalemate after going two games behind in the Ashes; that beat the Indian team in the historic venue off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever played in the the area, and then overcame the Pakistani team in the location off the back of another.

This is the England team, too, that managed to end up losing a Test by an innings defeat even though the opposition made a relatively low total; who ended up losing one of the more exciting matches ever contested after making a bold declaration in the initial batting effort against the Kiwis, and then repeated the action against Australia; who were thrashed by a huge margin in the venue, and who were on the losing side of one of Sri Lanka's finest wins. Between them, they have achieved some of the unlikeliest wins, suffered some of the most embarrassing exits, scored some of the unlikeliest centuries, and taken some of the most startling five-fers in the records of English cricket.

However this historic contest unfolds, they have been, successively, amazing, preposterous, absurd, frustrating, and entirely, unrepentantly, unashamedly thrilling.