After the past week's drama that saw one Test skipper consigned to history and another elevated to the mantle, there will be plenty of character built this summer as a much-anticipated Ashes series is fought out.

Careers will be decided on the flight of a ball or the elevation of an umpire's finger; days of toil from one side or another will be undone in an hour as a match takes a twist.

The stakes are high in any of the televised team sports played in Australia, but cricket, particularly Test cricket, does ask something extra of its participants.

Where a player in one of the winter football codes is able to make an awful error in the first five minutes and then erase it with a strong performance in the rest of the match, the summer sport is less forgiving, offering fewer opportunities to inject yourself into the game and more clearly defined measures of success.

You might wait two days to find yourself at the centre of the action, either with bat or ball, only to be sent back to the stands (or back to patrolling the outfield) due to a momentary lapse.

"Look at football [soccer]," England's Alastair Cook told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2017. "If you've played 500 games, people look past the mistakes. In cricket, you always start on 0. You always do."

Bad weather can decide matches, as can bad light. Someone who dominates on one sort of pitch, in particular conditions, might be awful on another.

A declaration might end a promising innings prematurely. A team-mate's fumbled catch might deny you the reward you deserved after a morning's back-breaking work with the ball.

Wickets are given based on an educated electronic guess about what a ball might have done if it hadn't thumped into a batsman's pad.

That's Test cricket - the form of the game that offers the time, space and eccentricities to really, properly torment those who play it.

It would be cruel if not for the fact the players are willing participants, wanting to test themselves at the highest level while the nation's sports-lovers watch.

Those players will have their character built (or reinforced) over after over, day after day during this Ashes series - and if that's not a reason to clear a space on the couch, it's hard to know what is.