It is just over an hour’s drive from Manchester city centre to Burnley’s Barnfield training ground beside Gawthorpe Hall, a stunning Jacobean house set in 40 acres of National Trust woodland. For Maxime Estève and CJ Egan-Riley, that daily round trip has offered some valuable ‘getting-to-know-you’ time.

They live in the same building, share lifts to training and, if you have watched them play together for Burnley this season, you might think they had been in each other’s pockets for years such is their understanding on the pitch.

But Burnley’s centre-half pairing, like much of a team largely unrecognisable from the one that was relegated from the Premier League under Vincent Kompany last season when they won five games and conceded 78 goals, is a pretty new construct.

In the final fortnight of the August transfer window, nine players exited and seven arrived at the club. It took the total number of summer signings to 15 and the departures to 20.

After so much upheaval, what is unfolding at Burnley this season is all the more impressive. No team in England have a better defensive record. Not even close.

Scott Parker’s side have conceded only nine goals in 26 Championship matches and will leapfrog Leeds United at the top of the table if they beat Sunderland at Turf Moor on Friday night.

Between September 28 and December 5, they conceded only two goals in 1,080 minutes of football. Sheffield United have the next best record across the country’s top four divisions and they have shipped 17 goals in 26 games this term – almost twice as many.

If Burnley maintain their current goals-conceded-per-game average of 0.35 they will finish the campaign with the best defensive record in the history of the professional English game, eclipsing Liverpool in 1978-79, when Bob Paisley’s team let in 16 goals across 42 games at an average of 0.38 per match en route to the old First Division title.

They are astonishing statistics and perhaps all the more surprising when you consider that four of Burnley’s five most-used defenders plus England Under-21 goalkeeper James Trafford had just 305 senior professional league appearances between them heading into this season, at an average of only 61 each.

It helps to explain why Parker has the third-youngest team in the second tier. Estève and Egan-Riley are, like Trafford, just 22. Bashir Humphreys, the Chelsea loanee, is 21, and Lucas Pires is a 23-year-old Brazilian left-back signed from Santos in July. They are proving that if you are good enough, you are old enough.

There is still experience in the ranks and one of the secrets of Burnley’s success is that Parker’s young guns have a number of invaluable older heads to lean on. Right-back Connor Roberts, 29, who was signed by Sean Dyche in 2021, has 60 appearances for Wales, for example.

But it says much about the team spirit Parker has forged in double-quick time that it is those players with fewer minutes who are proving important in the push for promotion.

Joe Worrall arrived late in the summer window after ending a 13-year association with Nottingham Forest and John Egan, 32, joined a few weeks later as a free agent after six years with Sheffield United. The veteran centre-backs are big voices in the dressing room and players to whom Estève and Egan-Riley know they can turn for advice.

“They speak before every game and at half-time,” explained the France Under-21 defender Estève, who completed a permanent £10.2 million move from Montpellier in the summer after initially arriving on loan last February, when Kompany was still in charge. “They are so experienced and are very important for us.

“They’ve played for top teams in England and Joe played in Turkey [with Besiktas] too. I’m still very young and need to learn and they’re top guys to work with. We have a very good relationship.”

Take the 2-0 win over Sheffield United last month when Egan-Riley wanted some tips on how best to handle Kieffer Moore, the experienced, 6ft 5in Wales striker. “I’ve played against Kieffer a lot and he’s really difficult to defend against aerially,” Worrall recounted. “He’s decent with his feet as well but in the air especially he’s a threat.

‘It’s not just about lads who are playing – it’s a union of centre-backs’

“I explained to CJ that Kieffer doesn’t like contact in the box so we spoke about it. ‘Watch him and if you get contact on him early and push him out of the box he’s uncomfortable with that.’ Eages [Egan] would chuck in his opinion as well and Max would listen too, so it’s not just about the lads who are playing. It’s definitely a unit – a union of us centre-backs.”

There is only one team who have conceded fewer goals than Burnley after 26 matches in English football history, and Parker just happened to be a member of that side. The former England midfielder may not have made many appearances for Chelsea in their 2004-05 Premier League title-winning campaign, when he was unable to dislodge the great Claude Makelele or Tiago. But he learnt plenty from Jose Mourinho about defensive discipline.

After an unhappy departure at Bournemouth and a fleeting 12-game spell in charge of Belgian side Bruges, Parker is quietly rebuilding his reputation in east Lancashire. Players talk about the time and painstaking detail with which Parker has drilled the team in their defensive shape, in and out of possession on the training ground, and the buy-in from the whole squad – forwards included.

There is a lot of digestible video analysis, some of it tailored to specific areas of the team or individuals, and the importance of hard work is stressed. Sprinting back when they lose possession and getting men back behind the ball quickly are non-negotiables. Parker says the defensive record is a “badge of honour” and Burnley’s players are taking great pride in it.

Worrall, now 28, says it is “probably the fittest team I’ve played in”. Parker, 44, still joins in training on occasions. “He’s all right,” the defender says. “His ankle is fused together so he hobbles around. He got involved a few weeks ago but he’s not been back since!”

Worrall remembers playing for Forest against Fulham at Craven Cottage as a 19-year-old when Parker was introduced as a late substitute in February 2017, a few months before he retired. “He simplifies things so well,” Worrall said. “His expertise and nous has rubbed off on us tenfold and how he’s gelled our dressing room in such a short space of time is incredible.”

Egan-Riley was originally signed from Manchester City in July 2022 but spent the second half of the last two seasons on loan at Hibernian and PSV Eindhoven’s second team respectively. Manchester born, he has had to be patient but he is making significant strides now alongside Estève, who says the added benefit of car sharing is it is improving his English. The former Manchester United midfielder Hannibal Mejbri, another summer signing, is often in the car with them, too.

“I need to improve my English so speaking to CJ is good for me,” Estève says. “We talk all the time, not only on the training ground and on the pitch. We see each other outside football, that’s very important for the relationship.

“We go home after games together and to training together. It’s really good. If he wants something I’ll always be there for him. I am friends with Bashir and all of the back line too. I just hope we keep this level together. But the main objective is we go up. If you told me we’d concede 40 goals this season but get promoted I’d sign for it now!”

Car sharing is a legacy from the Dyche era at Turf Moor. Worrall drives in with the likes of Josh Cullen, Lyle Foster, Ashley Barnes and Hannes Delcroix, all of whom live in Cheshire. Josh Brownhill, Luca Koleosho and Mike Tresor, who live in Manchester city centre, often come in together, too.

Burnley fans would doubtless like to see the team score more and play a little more expansively at times but they also want to see them winning and back in the top flight at the first attempt. For Trafford, who has 16 clean sheets already this season and doubtless has Jimmy Strong’s club record of 25 across all competitions from 1946-47 in his sights, the contrast with last season’s naive, alarmingly porous side could not be starker.

‘Carrot is promotion – going up automatically is the aim’

Current leaders Leeds may be the league’s big draw but Worrall says the players are “relishing that underdog remark about Burnley” and being “a working-class kind of football club”.

“That’s something that we have to embrace and something we are doing at the minute,” he said. “The carrot is promotion but going up automatically is definitely the aim.”

Burnley last played Sunderland a week before the close of the transfer window and lost 1-0 at the Stadium of Light. There was an air of chaos and turbulence around the club and the dressing room felt like a revolving door. Five months later, things could not feel much more stable, on and off the pitch.

That post-war side with whom Strong won promotion to the top flight in 1947 was nicknamed “the Iron Curtain” because of their defensive strength. It would be an appropriate moniker for Parker’s team, too.