England under Stokes have reminded the world that the sport of cricket is supposed to be entertainment.

Few recall the last ball of the Ashes. It's the first that's renowned. That stray ball that reaches the slip cordon, that cover drive for four, that fallen stump, shattering the stumps! Final deliveries? I needed to check. Moeen Ali edging a shot behind to finish an innings defeat in a dead rubber in 2015; Boyd Rankin being grabbed by the slip fielder off Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the tail-end of a quick disintegration in a 5-0 whitewash that's been full of them in 2014; a Harmison short ball ricocheting away Langer's shoulder for extras, the single four the Australian team achieve in a run chase they'll not attempt in 2005.

It's the difference between wondering how things will go, and seeing how they do. One thing's certain, there's no certainty there will be a positive outcome. For the past ten years, England's Australian tours have ended in ashes, as opposed to with them. Flower was dismissed as coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood was let go after another, in 2021-22. One could assemble a couple of teams out of English cricketers who participated in their concluding Test match at the conclusion of an Australian tour during the past 25 years, and even have a several individuals over to carry the drinks for each squad.

Stokes' squad have not asserted to care too much about consequences. Ben Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the ODI squad before him, consistently states that whether or not a lofted drive is taken at the rope isn't as important as if it was the right decision to play it in the first place, and during play he's pleased to applaud a delivery man who allows scoring shots so long as they bringing the team nearer to taking that subsequent dismissal. But then the primary motive Ben Stokes tried to guide his players to follow this style was so they would be in a more advantageous state to deliver the kind of cricket he believes will succeed for them in Australia.

The upcoming Ashes, for which they have been planning extensively, already feels like the result they are bound to face. It is Bazball's make or break moment. And there are numerous warnings of defeat in English cricket for the team to get away with it if they do suffer another disappointing result in the coming weeks. The captain's strategy has been based on defying expectations, and the other side is it appears there are plenty of people who would be delighted to be shown right.

Considering this, it's a appropriate time to point out that the important question is not only where this concludes, but if we enjoyed it along the way. A few years back, England were an utterly abject national side. They had been beaten in a quartet of successive tournaments and were trailing in the fifth, against India, when it was postponed 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. An eight-wicket defeat to the Kiwis at the Birmingham ground, A defeat by 157 runs to the Indian squad at the the famous stadium, an an innings defeat to the Aussie team at the iconic ground, A ten-wicket loss to the Caribbean side in the island nation.

England were thrashed by the Windies in Grenada in the early part of 2022 just before Joe Root resigned as skipper.

By the end, after all those stretches of testing and isolation and restricted environments and constant defeats at the hands of each rival, they were just about the most miserable and weary Test team England had ever fielded to a cricket field. A great deal of what Stokes and McCullum have done in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the Stokes' experiences during his time away from the game in 2021 when he had endured a bout of anxiety. It was created to emphasize to all that it was meant to be entertaining, if it was meant to be anything.

It still is 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 competing. Normal existence has a way of intruding, it can be challenging to hold on to the insights we gain in our lowest moments.

Presented is the English squad that secured consecutive run chases of three challenging targets in one season against New Zealand; that achieved 378 to defeat the subcontinent giants that corresponding period; that became the initial visiting side to win a clean sweep in the subcontinent country; that fought back to a stalemate after going 2-0 down in the Ashes; that beat India in Hyderabad 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 subsequent one.

Here we have the English squad, too, that somehow end up suffering a defeat in a Test by an innings defeat even though the opposition made a relatively low total; who ended up losing one of the finer contests ever staged after making a cocksure declaration in the first innings against the Black Caps, and then repeated the action against the Australian team; who were soundly beaten by a massive 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of the island nation's most notable triumphs. As a unit, they have recorded some of the surprising successes, experienced some of the most embarrassing exits, achieved some of the surprising tons, and taken some of the most surprising exceptional bowling spells in the history of English cricket.

However this historic contest concludes, they have been, one after another, astonishing, preposterous, ridiculous, exasperating, and totally, without regret, boldly entertaining.