The Spider | Stokes’ England reminded us all that cricket is meant to be fun

Nno one talks about the last ball of the Ashes. It is the first one that is famous. That wide flying to slip, that cover drive for four, that wicket, got him bowled! Last balls? I had to look them up. Moeen Ali cut a drive behind to cap off an innings defeat in a dead rubber in 2015; Boyd Rankin is kidnapped by Ryan Harris, Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the end of a 30-over collapse in a 5-0 whitewash that was full of them in 2014; a Steve Harmison bouncer that ricochets off Justin Langer’s shoulder for four leg byes, the only four Australians to score in a chase they will never make in 2005.

It’s the difference between wondering how things will go and knowing how they will go. One thing is certain: there is no guarantee that there will be a happy ending. Over the past decade, Australia’s tours of England have ended in ashes, rather than with them. Andy Flower lost his job as head coach after one humiliating defeat, in 2013/14, and Chris Silverwood lost his job after another, in 2021/22. You can make a few XIs of England players who played their last Test match at the end of an Australian tour of the last 25 years, and still have a few men to carry the drinks for both sides.

This England team has never pretended to care too much about the consequences. Ben Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, always says that whether or not he catches a lofted drive on the boundary is not as important as whether or not it was the right decision to play it at all, and in the field he is happy to clap a bowler who betrays boundaries as long as they move the team closer to taking that next wicket. But the reason why Stokes tried to teach his team to play this way was so that they would be in a better position to deliver the kind of cricket he thinks will be good for them in Australia.

This Ashes series, which they have been preparing for for so long, already feels like the outcome they cannot ignore. It’s Bazball’s make or break moment. And there are too many ‘I told you so’ in English cricket for the team to get away with suffering another heavy defeat in the coming weeks. Stokes’ approach is based on proving everyone wrong, and the downside is that it feels like there are plenty of people who would love to be proven right.

So it’s a good time to point out that the important question is not just where this all ends up, but whether we enjoyed it along the way. Four years ago, England were an utterly despicable cricket team. They were defeated in four straight series and were behind in the fifth, against India, when it was suspended due to Covid. They had won exactly one of the 17 Test matches and lost 12 of them by embarrassing margins. Eight wickets to New Zealand at Edgbaston, 157 runs to India at the Oval, an innings and 14 runs to Australia at Melbourne, 10 wickets to West Indies at Grenada.

By the end, after all those months of nasal swabs and social distancing, bio-secure bubbles and endless beatings by everyone they played, they were just about the most miserable and caring Test team England had ever put on a cricket field. Much of what Stokes and Brendon McCullum have done in the years since has been in response to all that, as well as the former’s experiences during his five-month break from playing in 2021, when he suffered a series of panic attacks. It was designed to remind everyone that it was meant to be fun, if it was meant to be at all.

That is still the case today. Even when the Ashes are on the line, and even when the team ultimately agrees that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they play the game. Everyday life has a way of intruding, it can be difficult to hold on to the lessons we learn in our lowest moments.

This is the England team that completed consecutive fourth-innings chases of 277, 299 and 296 against New Zealand in one summer; that saw 378 beat India that same summer; that became the first touring team to get a clean sheet in Pakistan; which fought back to a draw after a 2-0 defeat in the Ashes; who defeated India in Hyderabad after one of the greatest innings ever played on the subcontinent, and then defeated Pakistan in Multan after another.

It is also the England team that finally managed to lose a Test by an innings, even though the opponent only scored 326; who lost one of the better Tests ever after making a confident statement in the first innings against New Zealand, and then did the same against Australia; who were routed by 434 runs in Rajkot and found themselves on the wrong side of one of Sri Lanka’s biggest victories. Together they have achieved some of the most unlikely victories, endured some of the ugliest dismissals, scored some of the most unlikely centuries and achieved some of the most surprising five-fers in the history of English cricket.

However these Ashes series turn out, they have been astonishing, ridiculous, absurd, infuriating and completely, unrepentantly and unapologetically entertaining.