Hatters boss is confident Tom Lockyer will play for Luton again after he recovers from ankle surgery

Luton boss Rob Edwards has revealed that defender Tom Lockyer's possible return to first team football has been delayed even further by an ankle operation.

The 30-year-old had been back in full training with the first team squad at the Brache as he recovered from an on-field cardiac arrest that he suffered at AFC Bournemouth, an incident that happened just over a year ago now, on December 16, 2024. Lockyer's recuperation was going so well that the Welsh international was due to get some game time for the club’s U21s recently, before he suffered the injury which unfortunately required a procedure.

He will now need a few months before being able to consider pulling on a Hatters shirt once more and adding to his 117 appearances for Luton, which might now in fact be next season rather than the current Championship campaign. Giving some more information about the centre half this afternoon, Edwards said: “Locks was doing really well, everything's fine from a cardiac point of view but then he cleared the ball in training and rolled his ankle badly, so he's had to go under the knife to have an operation to fix the damaged ligament in his ankle.

“He was ticking all the boxes, he got to around the fourth stage of his rehab, he was into full training with us, the next step would have been minutes with the 21s and the week before he was due to get that, he cleared the ball and landed awkwardly. So incredibly frustrating, obviously for all of us, but for him as well as he'd worked so hard. I’ve got to stress that the cardiac and all of that side of it is fine, this is just an ankle now, so we'll support him and try to get him through this stage of the rehab.

"Then there's going to be boxes for him to tick again, that end stage stuff that we've got to make sure that we do, so that could just make the return a little bit longer than what would normally be the case for this (injury). It will be a few months, I don’t want to put him under loads more stress or pressure, but we won't need to, he'll be doing that anyway. He’ll be pushing as hard as possible. We get him through this in terms of the ankle, then I don’t think there's any reason why he won’t play.”

When Lockyer first suffered the cardiac arrest on the south coast, there hadn't been any consideration to him ever playing again after his heart stopped for over two minutes. However, the last 12 months has seen the defender make a quite remarkable recovery though, as Edwards added: “That's due to him as a person, the fact that everything has gone very, very well.

"He's in really good condition and every specialist and everyone who's looking at him, all the medical guys, are really pleased with every step of the process. I think we’ve done it really well and even with Locks, he's pushing it further and faster. He wants to be coming back even quicker, but we've made sure that we've done everything to the best of our ability and with as much detail as we can.

"No cutting corners with this as obviously it’s so important. With this, you have to see the best, and he has, and everything has gone, it actually has gone by the book, apart from doing his ankle. There’s always a risk with that when you’ve been out for quite a long period of time, other injuries can occur. This was a bit of a freak one and it almost upset him more than what happened a year ago as he fought so hard and worked so hard to get close, but he'll get there, he'll get there.”