Ahead of World Heart Day on Sunday, Luton Town club captain Tom Lockyer and manager Rob Edwards joined forces to help promote Sky Bet and the British Heart Foundation’s Every Minute Matters campaign.

League sponsors Sky Bet have announced they are donating £1,000 for every goal scored in the EFL this weekend.

The donations are part of the campaign that was launched this year by Sky Bet in partnership with the BHF. The groundbreaking campaign is on a mission to raise £3 million and recruit 270,000 football fans to learn CPR.

The campaign has already proved a big hit, with Sky Bet donating £500,000 to fund the vital work of the BHF and over 90,000 people learning CPR since the campaign launched.

There are more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK each year, equating to at least five every 90 minutes. Each minute that passes without CPR reduces the chance of survival by up to 10 per cent. Research commissioned by Sky Bet found that 45% of football fans lack the confidence to perform CPR. The British Heart Foundation’s online tool RevivR provides a quick and easy course for those looking to learn.

Tom and Rob filmed an emotional walk and talk at The Brache training ground earlier this week, in which they discussed the two occasions in which our skipper has suffered heart-related episodes, the first an atrial fibrillation at Wembley in the Sky Bet Championship play-off final win over Coventry in May 2023, then last December when he suffered a cardiac arrest in the Premier League fixture at Bournemouth.

“I’ve had two incidents now, and I think Bournemouth was easier for me because it was happening to me, and I always felt it was a lot harder for people witnessing that day,” said Tom, before asking Rob: “Obviously, us being so close, how did that affect you?”

The manager, who raced onto the Vitality Stadium pitch immediately after his captain’s second collapse, replied: “Standing here talking to you, it’s still emotional now. I still don’t think I’ve fully recovered from it, which is weird saying this to you, because you are the one who was going through it, so it sounds strange me even saying that.

“It was hard to see that happening to you at the time and it was eerie. I’ll never ever forget it. Everything. Taylor (Tom’s partner) was down there then on the side of the pitch, and all football, everything else just goes out of the window and it just becomes about a life – and a life of a person you love and admire and you just desperately want them to be ok.”

Tom wants everyone to learn CPR and have the knowledge to potentially be a hero, just like the medics who saved him on that day by the south coast.

“You can’t tell someone how they are going to react in this situation because I spoke to Carlton (Morris), and he’s one of my best mates. He said he just froze in that situation when he saw me down at Bournemouth. He said he knew something serious was happening, but he just froze.

“I always put it back to, if you knew what to do in that situation, you’d be more likely to act instead of freezing.

“Thirty-thousand people a year will have a cardiac arrest and less than 10 per cent will survive. We have 90,000 people who have learnt CPR on the British Heart Foundation website, with the RevivR tool.

“All you need to do is Google that and it’ll take you straight to it and you can learn CPR in just 15 minutes. Nobody knows how to react in that situation, but if you know what you are doing, you are more likely to step up and be somebody’s hero, so please, please, please get it done.”

No need to Google. Learn CPR in just 15 mins by clicking here.