The impressive emergence of Brydon Carse is the latest stage in the rebuilding of an England pace attack in a previously unthinkable world without James Anderson and Stuart Broad.
Not everything is about the Ashes but, for this area of the team, that plane journey to Perth in November next year is paramount. Stokes is not the first England captain to put together a long-term plan to have a pace battery down under. He will know plenty before him have arrived for a gun battle armed only with pea shooters.
A year out, there is a long list of names that could find themselves in Australia: Carse, Matthew Potts, Mark Wood, Josh Tongue, Chris Woakes, Gus Atkinson, Olly Stone, Josh Hull, Dillon Pennington and John Turner.
What about Jofra Archer, whose latest return from injury is being painstakingly managed? It would be joyous to see Archer back in England whites and he has said that is his long-term goal.
How England get him to that point is ticklish. There are tighter restrictions around entering the Indian Premier League auction this year, to mitigate against players dipping in and out of lucrative deals.
For Archer to get back to the Test team, he will surely have to play for Sussex at some point. The most obvious time to do so would be in the early part of the 2025 summer, when the County Championship clashes with the IPL.
Then there is the wildcard, Dan Worrall. The 33-year-old, born in Melbourne and with three Australia ODI caps, qualifies to play for England in the spring thanks to a British passport and three seasons with Surrey. Alec Stewart has likened him to Anderson.
When Kent fast bowler Martin McCague, raised in Western Australia, played for England in the early 1990s the Aussie media called him “the rat that joined the sinking ship”. Just imagine the hullabaloo if Worrall is part of the England squad this time next year.
