NEWS
Follow UsFormer New Zealand batter Lou Vincent threw light on his match-fixing saga in the now-defunct Indian Cricket League (ICL), which saw his cricketing world come crashing down as he was given 11 life bans by the England and Wales Cricket Board.
But now that he has been given permission to be involved in domestic cricket at the age of 46, the former Kiwi player has come out and spoken on the harrowing experience and how it all started and ended.
“I didn’t have the mental package to be a professional sports player,” Vincent admitted in his interview with English daily The Telegraph.
“At 28, I was deeply depressed and then went to India, and was dragged, sucked into that fixing world. It was pretty easy to see how it happened.
"I felt like I was part of a gang. It almost made me feel better, because I was thinking: ‘I am part of a match-fixing gang, I am with a group that’s going to have my back and nobody knows our little secret,” he narrated the story of how it all began in India.
Vincent was part of the Chandigarh Lions and ICL World XI teams in the two seasons of the league.
Talking about his gullibility to being loved, cared for and accepted in general due to being away from family for a large part of his teenage life, Vincent said, “I raised myself from the age of 12, so I was always quite malleable to people around me. Because I wanted to be loved, you’re easily led astray.
"That contributed massively towards my professional career of just wanting to be liked, wanting to be loved, and sort of sharing how I was feeling on tour,” conceded the man who hit a century on debut against Australia.
But once he was caught in the web of fixing, Vincent did not have a way out.
“When you’re in that world, it’s hard to get out. There’s always a very underlying threat of ‘we know you, we know your kids’.
"You know, there’s never a direct threat. But they make it very clear that they’re involved with some pretty heavy underground gangs,” said the Auckland-born.
“And, ‘you owe us, and you always will owe us’. Even if you’ve completed the fixing, they own you. It’s hard to get out, and the only way to get out was the way I did (confess),” he added, showcasing the vulnerability as well as the helplessness of a man once trapped in the match-fixing saga.
So how did he come out eventually? Vincent, who played 103 ODIs and 23 Tests for the Blackcaps, scoring 3745 runs with six centuries in both formats combined, explained it perfectly.
“Coming clean and approaching the players’ association and telling them what was happening, ‘where do we go from here?’, was the start of turning it around. The ECB were great to deal with,” he said.
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