'Your reputation as a player is won and lost in Ashes series'

For every player who has the honour of travelling to Australia to take part in the oldest Test rivalry of all, there will come a moment in the campaign when the scale of their challenge makes itself fully apparent. For some, that will be the frenzy of media attention as they arrive jetlagged at the airport; for others, it will be the vast size of the five Test venues, or the wall of noise on those first mornings at Brisbane or the MCG.

But whatever that defining moment turns out to be, one constant companion throughout England's three-month stay will be an overwhelming weight of history. From the very first Test match in 1876-77, to the origins of the Ashes five years later, and on through the ebbs and flows of a rivalry that is now into its 15th decade, every series brings with it an inescapable sense of being a part of something that is bigger than the here-and-now.

England's record on Ashes campaigns Down Under serves to underline the magnitude of the campaign that Joe Root's men are undertaking. In 18 official Ashes tours since the end of the Second World War, the visitors have emerged triumphant on just five occasions, most recently in 2010-11, when Andrew Strauss's men claimed a famous 3-1 series win.

"You look forward to it so much," says Graeme Swann, who was England's senior spinner on that tour and will be back in Australia as a pundit for BT Sport this winter. "As England players, you sit down and the management tells you to say 'every day is as important as the next' … it's not, the Ashes is bigger.

"As a player, you know that. You don't sleep properly for a week beforehand. I used to pace up and down, because I was so excited for the Ashes."

Even a player with a profile as huge as Kevin Pietersen recognises this fact. With his England career behind him, Pietersen is now able to look back on his role in six Ashes campaigns between 2005 and 2013-14, and recall the little moments within the bigger picture that count almost as much as his victories and defeats.

"Flintoff's reverse-swing, Harmison at full tilt in that 2005 Ashes, it was just a thing of beauty and that's why I look back so fondly at my career and realise what I came from," he says. "When you have the ability to watch Ricky Ponting score 150 to save a Test match, and literally walk past him and brush him and think 'cor, I've just touched Ricky Ponting, Ricky Ponting is a legend', those are the moments that just make your career so special."

"It was never just another series," says ESPN's Mark Butcher, a veteran of four Ashes campaigns between 1997 and 2002-03. "Your reputation as a player is won and lost in Ashes series - it certainly was in my case. If you can have some eye-catching performances in Ashes series, they can delete one or two less conspicuous performances elsewhere. There was always an enormous amount riding on it."

"The build-up generally starts as soon as the last series finishes," says Michael Vaughan, England's Ashes-winning captain in 2005 and also a BT Sport pundit. "And now the talk becomes a little more hostile and to the point. I heard David Warner mention war the other week… I've never seen any tanks arrive on a cricket field, or machine guns, but these words come out of people's mouths in a build-up to an Ashes series."

And if much of that build-up is mere media hype, then there is also a literal build-up for England's cricketers to navigate. Whereas most international tours are conducted these days with little or no acclimatisation, the significance of a tour of Australia requires that a traditional layer of preparation is retained.

And so, with three practice matches spread over the first three weeks of the tour, England have a chance to get their plans more finely tuned than in any other contemporary series, but also to allow their pre-series anxieties to escalate given that things haven't exactly gone entirely to plan: a side strain has kept Moeen Ali out of action since the first nets session, Steven Finn has suffered a tour-ending knee injury, while Alastair Cook has picked up just 15 runs in his first two innings at Perth and Adelaide.

Butcher remembers from his first Ashes tour, back in 1998-99, how the pressure can build in such circumstances. In his first first-class innings of the tour, at the Waca in Perth, he faced up to the lively young quick, Matt Nicholson and was struck a savage blow above the right eye that has left a scar to this day.

"After that I spent a couple of days in my room," Butcher says. "More than the pain of getting hit and having a scar, it was the error I had made in front of so many people, with everyone watching before an Ashes series. There was a psychological issue there, so I decided to retreat, keep myself to myself until I was ready to face people again."

In Butcher's case, it turned out to be alright on the night, for he battled back from that injury with a Test hundred in his first innings of the series at Brisbane - proof, he believes, that he played his best cricket when the going got tough. But not everyone in every Ashes has thrived on adversity in the same way, and according to Pietersen, a fatal miscalculation was made when the squad assembled at Heathrow prior to his first tour of Australia, the 5-0 whitewash in 2006-07.

"That tour was a shambles before we got on the plane," he says. "We had a team meeting at the hotel, and our media liaison guy started talking about how this is going to be the biggest series you'll ever play in. And so when we left, people were just thinking 'oh my gosh, what do we need to do?'"

That said, Pietersen also admits that one or two of England's current players wouldn't have minded that sort of a briefing ahead of this campaign.

"You see a guy like Stuart Broad, when he goes to Australia now, he knows an Ashes series, in particular away from home, defines you as a cricketer in England," says Pietersen. "It also defines an Australian as a cricketer, so you'll see that he'll commit and he'll run and he'll bowl all day every day in an Ashes series, as opposed to if he was playing Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or someone else at home."

The history of the Ashes will hang heavy in the air throughout the series, but England might find that the venues themselves shield them a touch from the ghosts of the past. The MCG - the venue for the first Test match 140 years ago - is these days a huge concrete bowl, as is the Gabba in Brisbane and vast tracts of both the Sydney Cricket Ground and the recently constructed Adelaide Oval.

Only the Waca in Perth remains largely unaltered from the venue that first hosted Ashes cricket in 1970-71, but it is running on borrowed time, with a purpose-built stadium, with dual cricket- and Aussie Rules football-usage, due to be up and running by England's next visit in four years' time.

"One thing that's a real shame about Australia is that they've allowed all this tradition to disappear," says Swann. "It breaks my heart at Adelaide, people still say it's a gorgeous ground, but it's not the beautiful cricket ground it used to be with its red roofs and the seagulls … they don't even get seagulls there any more, they don't like AFL! That's why I like the Waca so much, because it's still got the history."

Both Swann and Vaughan agree that the only venue at which the players get a full connection with the Ashes of yesteryear is Sydney, with its beautiful Members' and Ladies' Pavilion, which date back to the 19th century, but which these days offer a scenic anachronism within the vast amphitheatre that has been erected around them.

"When you walk through the pavilion, like at Lord's, it's got the pictures and you can smell the history," says Swann. "In the changing rooms, you can read the graffiti on the side of the lockers where people have won, which someone tried to rub out [in 2010-11] so I wrote over it again the next time I was there.

"You can taste the history there unlike the other stadiums, which are a bit more detached, more commercial. But as a player, you don't really care once the game is underway, it doesn't matter where you are playing."

"I reckon Lord's, Newlands and the SCG are my three favourite venues," says Vaughan. "You can sniff the heritage, the statues outside, the boards in the dressing room with all the messages. The members sitting out front, the fact that you have to walk through the members, the balcony that you sit out on, where you can hear the conversations in front of you. Yes, they're Australian, but they are cricket fans, and they have a real respect for the game in Sydney. They respect the opposing side, you don't really feel they are against you."

"The ground is a concrete jungle, like most their venues, but the pavilion and that area is your sanctuary, and is still old and full of history. I went there when we were 4-0 down [in 2002-03] but it was still such a special week for playing cricket. There are times in your career when you go to venues and feel very fortunate. Lord's, Newlands, Mumbai, Kolkata … you arrive and you are just sniffing through history. You look through the venues and sit down in the dressing rooms and think a lot of great names have been here."