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Tom Lockyer, the 29-year-old captain of Premier League club Luton Town, suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch while playing for the team back in December 2023 and has since had a defibrillator surgically implanted into his body.
In a video shared by Sky Sports, Lockyer shows off his new implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, and while the technology is clearly incredible, the extent to which the defibrillator can be seen sticking out of the side of his rib cage is also quite shocking.
Luton captain Tom Lockyer explains how his newly-fitted defibrillator will 'give him a shock' if his heart-rate goes outside of the normal parameters 💭 pic.twitter.com/pYFps3A5vF
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) February 20, 2024
On December 16, 2023, Lockyer collapsed in the 59th minute during a game against Bournemouth at Vitality Stadium due to a cardiac arrest, which resulted in his heart stopping for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Lockyer then spent five days in the hospital after having surgery to implant the cardioverter defibrillator inside of him.
“Two minutes, 40 seconds I was out for,” Lockyer told Sky Sports in an interview.
“I was running up to the halfway line and went really light-headed. I remember thinking ‘I will be OK in a second’ and eventually I wasn’t. I woke up and the paramedics and everyone were everywhere,” he explained. “I was a little bit disorientated, couldn’t speak or move, I was just trying to work out what was happening.”
“While that was going on I remember thinking ‘I could be dying here’ and it’s quite a surreal thought thinking that and not being able to move and respond.”
Lockyer, who first began his career with Bristol Rovers in 2012, has been a centerback at Luton Town since the start of the 2020 season and was named team captain in 2022.
Luton Town plays its football at Kenilworth Road, which is an 11,500-seat stadium situated in the center of the Bury Park neighborhood, thus requiring away fans to walk up a set of stairs that effectively goes through someone’s residential backyard.
This season, the 2023-24 campaign, is the club’s first in the Premier League since 1992. Despite the underequipped size and budget of the club, Luton Town currently sits 18th in the Premier League with 20 points, which is tied with Everton, who sit in 17th due to a better goal difference.
While Luton currently finds themselves in the relegation zone, their current point total (as of February 20) is enough that, at the very least, they are in the mix to potentially survive relegation given that they’re tied with Everton and are just four points behind 16th-place Nottingham Forrest.