Stokes' England have shown the world that the sport of cricket is meant to be fun.

People rarely mention the last ball of the Ashes. It's the first that's renowned. That stray ball that goes to the slips, that beautiful stroke for four, that fallen stump, shattering the stumps! Final deliveries? I needed to check. Moeen Ali cutting a stroke behind to conclude a batting effort loss in a dead rubber in 2015; Boyd Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Harris, Rankin featuring in his single Test at the tail-end of a 30-over collapse in a clean sweep that's been commonplace in 2014; a Steve Harmison bouncer glancing off Langer's shoulder for extras, the only four Australia achieve in a target they'll never get to make in 2005.

It separates between questioning how things will go, and knowing how they do. One undeniable fact, there's no certainty there will be a successful conclusion. For the last decade, England's trips Down Under have finished in defeat, instead of with them. Andy Flower was dismissed as coach after a crushing loss, in 2013-14, Silverwood was let go after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. You can make a two lineups out of national team members who featured in their final Test match at the conclusion of an Australian tour during the past 25 years, and even have a few players over to serve as reserves for each squad.

This England team have never claimed to worry excessively about outcomes. Ben Stokes, like Morgan with the limited-overs team before him, frequently remarks that whether or not a aerial shot is taken at the rope is secondary as whether it was the right decision to execute it in the first place, and in the field he's pleased to applaud a delivery man who gives away boundaries so long as they help bring the team toward taking that following breakthrough. But then the key rationale Stokes tried to instruct his squad to follow this style was so they would be in a more advantageous state to produce the brand of the game he believes will perform effectively for them in Australia.

The upcoming Ashes, for which they have been preparing for so long, already seems like the outcome they are bound to face. It is this bold strategy's critical moment. And there are an abundance of predictions of failure in the English game for the team to get away with it if they do endure a further poor loss in the next few weeks. Stokes's approach has been predicated on proving everyone wrong, and the flipside is it feels as if there are many individuals who would be thrilled to be validated.

In light of this, it's a good moment to emphasize that the important question isn't just where this all ends up, but if we enjoyed it along the way. Four years ago, the English team were an utterly abject national side. They had been overcome in four straight contests and were trailing in the fifth one, against the Indian team, when it was halted because of Covid. They had won only one Test match out of a series of 17, and lost twelve of them by large defeats. A loss by eight wickets to the Kiwis at the Birmingham ground, 157 runs to India at the the famous stadium, an an innings defeat to Australia at Melbourne, A ten-wicket loss to the Windies in Grenada.

The team was soundly beaten by West Indies in the venue in March 2022 just before Root stepped aside as captain.

By the end, after all those months of nasal swabs and social distancing and restricted environments and constant defeats at the hands of all opponents, they were just about the most miserable and exhausted Test team England had ever fielded to a cricket field. A significant portion of what Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have accomplished in the subsequent years was in a consequence of all that, as well as the former's individual trials during his time away from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a period of mental health challenges. It was intended to make people recall that it was meant to be entertaining, if it was meant to be anything at all.

It still is now. Although the the prestigious contest is on the line, and although the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they go about performing. Daily routines has a way of crowding in, it can be hard to retain the knowledge we acquire in our lowest moments.

Presented is the England team that achieved successive run chases of 277, 299, and 296 in one summer against New Zealand; that scored 378 to beat the Indian team that identical season; that became the first touring team to win a comprehensive victory in the subcontinent country; that showed resilience to a stalemate after going 2-0 down in the the contest; that beat India in the southern city off the back of one of the most remarkable knocks ever played in the the area, and then beat the Pakistani team in the city off the back of a further exceptional performance.

This is the England team, too, that managed to end up losing a Test by an innings even though the other team made a modest 326; who concluded suffering a loss in one of the finer contests ever staged after making a confident decision in the initial batting effort against the Kiwis, and then followed suit against the Australian team; who were routed by a massive 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of the island nation's finest wins. As a unit, they have secured some of the most improbable victories, endured some of the ugliest dismissals, made some of the unlikeliest hundreds, and secured some of the most remarkable five-fers in the annals of the English game.

Regardless of how this Ashes series unfolds, they have been, one after another, incredible, preposterous, unconventional, frustrating, and completely, without regret, boldly enjoyable.