Club captain Tom Lockyer has suffered a setback in his return to football after sustaining ankle ligament damage in training.
The 30-year-old centre-half, who was within a week of featuring for the Hatters development squad in his comeback after suffering a cardiac arrest 12 months ago, has had an operation on the injury.
Manager Rob Edwards confirmed at his his Thursday press conference: “Locks was doing really well, everything was fine from a cardiac point of view, but then he cleared a ball in training and rolled his ankle badly.
“He’s had to go under the knife and had an operation to fix that damaged ligament in his ankle. So we had to then take a decision to bolster the squad a little bit in the short-term, and Erik Pieters can come in and help us a little bit with that.”
On how close Locks was to a return, the boss said: “There was that potential. He was doing really well, he was ticking all the boxes and got to around the fourth stage of his rehab, he was into full training with us and the next step would have been minutes with the Under-21s.
“It was the week before that he was due to get that. He cleared the ball and just landed awkwardly, so incredibly frustrating – obviously for all of us, but for him as well because he’d worked so hard.
“I’ve got to stress that cardiac and all that side of it, he was absolutely fine. This is an ankle now, so we support him and try to get him through this stage of the rehab, and there are going to be boxes for him to tick again, that end-stage stuff that we’ve got to make sure we do again, so that might just make the return a little bit longer than would normally be the case for this.”
Asked about the fact Lockyer had been in a position to return to a pitch, the manager went on: “It is (remarkable), and that’s down 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 that’s looking at him, all the medical guys, have been really pleased with every step of the process.
“I think we’ve done it really well and even with Locks in the end, he’s pushing even further and faster and wants to be going 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 because obviously it’s so important, and we are getting through this now – in terms of the ankle – and I don’t think there is any reason why he won’t play.”
Lockyer had been under the guidance of medical experts who dealt with Christian Eriksen’s return to playing football, and Edwards continued: “With this, you have to see the best, and he has. Everything has gone by the book, apart from getting towards the end of this now and doing his ankle.
“There is always a risk of that, when you’ve been out for quite a long period of time, other injuries can occur. This is obviously a bit of a freak one and it actually almost upset him more than what happened a year ago, because he’d worked so hard and fought so hard to get so close, but he’ll get there.”
Not wanting to put a timescale on his return, the Town boss added: “Operations are always serious and I don’t want to put a period of time on it, but it’ll be a few months, so we’ll see.
“Then he’s got the end stage stuff to make sure he does as well, because he didn’t get to tick off the final stages. It’ll be a period of time now and we don’t want to put him under loads more stress and pressure. We won’t need to, he’ll be doing that anyway and pushing as hard as possible.”
