Dr Ben Rosenblatt is the most important person on the England team you've never heard of.

He is the physical performance coach who is helping to prepare England for the test of extra time and penalties, which so far has worked, securing them their first ever victory in a World Cup penalty shoot out and a place in the semi-final against Croatia on Wednesday night.

Dr Rosenblatt is the man behind the scenes helping the England squad to conserve their energy to last up to 120 minutes playing in high temperatures.

As the Football Association’s leading physical performance and fitness coach, he was the one that helped them fight the fatigue that saw them through the game against Colombia.

And now he is tasked with getting them through the semi-final game with Croatia after beating Sweden on Saturday.

Luckily for England, Dr Rosenblatt, who lives in Finchley, north London, is no stranger to preparing teams for victory.

In 2016, he helped Team GB's women's hockey team to gold medal success in the Olympics.

After working with the squad for three years, he returned to Britain from Rio to celebratory scenes at Heathrow.

At the time the sports scientist described the historic hockey victory as a "team effort".

He said: "The players get medals but the support staff and coaches don't. They go and win the thing; our job is to make sure they are prepared to compete and to win in those environments."

After the Olympics, he started his job at the Football Association as a physical performance coach.

At the time he said: "I won't be working with the senior England team.

"I'll be working across all the age groups and putting a strategy in place to develop their physical performance."

Dr Rosenblatt was born in 1984 and is the son of Ian Rosenblatt, a senior lawyer who was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours, for philanthropic services to music, in 2016. His mother Emma Rosenblatt is a sculptor.

He grew up participating regularly in Jewish sport, playing in the Maccabi League and subsequently with the Wingate and Finchley amateur football club.

He told the JC that his career had rarely brought him in to contact with professional Jewish sportsmen or women.

"Hundreds of Jewish kids turn up and play football every week, and play all these other sports when they're growing up. But for one reason or another they don't seem to continue it past their teenage years," he said.

"Maybe it's not on everybody's radar within the Jewish community that they can have a career in elite sport," Dr Rosenblatt added.