Over the past 12 months, Ben Stokes, Brendon McCullum and their gloriously free-spirited England team have taken cricket fans on an unexpected journey from the utterly abject to the thrillingly absurd. Over the next six weeks, they have the chance to drag the rest of the country along, too.
Across five Tests, from Birmingham to Manchester, Leeds and twice to London, England and Australia’s men will go toe-to-toe in a series so delicately poised that few level voices have dared offer a prediction more extreme than 3-2 in either direction.
The Ashes demand headline billing. Cricket, like just about every sport not called football, has something of an internal paranoia about its place in the wider British sporting conscience.
In truth, many games are more marginalised, and most would give their actual ball for the kind of exposure enjoyed in the landmark successes of the 2005 Ashes and 2019 ODI World Cup.
Fittingly, this summer’s series, the most widely anticipated since Michael Vaughan’s legendary team ended Australia’s dominance 18 years ago, has the potential to deliver a confluence of those two great triumphs.
The old rivals remain the same, the famous urn still the prize, but England’s plan to conquer the former and seize the latter is built around a high-octane approach lifted from one-day cricket and never before seen in the Test sphere.
When Stokes took on the captaincy little more than a year ago, he was just about the only candidate for the role. Former New Zealand batter McCullum was, as head coach, one plucked from left-field.
Together, though, they have proven leaders beyond inspiration, taking a broken team that had won just once in 17 matches and infusing it with a rock star swagger that has since yielded 11 wins in 13, exhibiting an aggressive brand of cricket with no precedent, nor really, the right to work.
“Bazball”, as it has come to be known, has charged through all all-comers to arrive here at something of a final frontier and a monumental clash of styles.
Australia are the traditionalists, officially the best team in the world, their bowling attack led by the relentless Pat Cummins, their batting by the doggedly brilliant Steve Smith.
England, meanwhile, are a side who wear bucket hats and prepare for Test matches on the golf course, and claim the invention of ludicrous roles like “The Nighthawk”, a side with both disregard for and obsession with the record books, who profess to value entertainment over results.
That mantra will be put through the ultimate stress test. The Ashes can define careers like no other contest. Should it emerge intact, though, we will all have been on one hell of a ride.
