Lou Vincent is wearing Converse trainers, chinos and a white shirt with a stripy red-and-pink tie. He thinks it is the first time he has worn a tie since he “was last in court”.
He is sitting at a table chatting over coffee in a cafe just a short walk away from the Basin Reserve, about two hours before the start of the second test between New Zealand and England.
It is one of those cafes where everything comes with avocado and you can order grilled asparagus with your eggs. “Yeah, you don’t get this kind of place where I live now,” he says.
Vincent has just spoken to a room of 120 people at a pre-test match breakfast in the Norwood Room overlooking the pitch at the Basin Reserve, hence the shirt and tie. The last time he was at the ground for a test match, he was playing in it. Not only that, he scored 224 against Sri Lanka. That was in 2005. He never played another home test. Two years later his international career was over by the age of 29.
He lost his New Zealand contract, suffered from depression, lived a nomadic life in club and county cricket playing for Sussex and Lancashire, signed up for the Indian Cricket League, a rival to the Indian Premier League, in 2008 where he was recruited into a spot-fixing ring, and his life spiralled.
‘It’s like, hell, where do I go from here?’
In 2014, he was given 11 life bans by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for fixing in three county matches three years earlier. “I guess it is like someone who has been a doctor for 20 years and then they get struck off. It’s like, hell, where do I go from here?”
That ban was reduced only this year. He can now coach at domestic and grassroots level. The breakfast was the first time he has spoken publicly to an audience about his experiences. This is his first major interview since his ban was lifted.
It is a remarkable story. And Vincent, stressing he is not looking for sympathy or forgiveness, is open about his life, how he coped with public shame and found solace living in a remote part of New Zealand’s North Island near Ninety Mile Beach, where he makes a living “doing up old s***ty houses”.
It is why he does not own a tie. “Most of my clothes are from the op shop [charity shop] because I will only get paint on them. It is why I wear Converse shoes to a formal event. I don’t have anything else. Sandals, Converse or bare feet.”
One part of the story goes largely unsaid: the role of Chris Cairns in his life. Cairns, coincidentally, is also in Wellington, for a reunion of the 1999 side who won in England. Their paths do not cross.
In 2012, Cairns won a libel case against Lalit Modi, the founder of the IPL, after Modi had accused Cairns of fixing. When Vincent confessed to the cricket authorities about his fixing in 2014, he said Cairns had recruited him. An allegation strenuously denied by Cairns.
Cairns was charged with perjury relating to the evidence he gave at the earlier libel case and, in 2015, Vincent gave evidence against Cairns in the perjury trial, along with Brendon McCullum. Cairns was acquitted by a jury.
Cairns has suffered serious ill health recently. He almost died from a heart attack in 2021 and was left paralysed from the waist down by the surgery that saved his life.
‘I sent Cairns a text to wish him well – he never replied’
Vincent reveals he dropped him a line. “Six months after his heart attack I reached out to him. I sent him a message, just wishing him well and hope he recovers well. And you know, when someone goes through a major health scare like that, it’s devastating, especially for a man that’s been so powerful for New Zealand sport. And yeah, he read it. Never replied, it’s okay. I wish him well.”
Vincent was clearly nervous before the breakfast that morning but made people laugh, the audience gripped by his talk. He describes wearing a fake wig and glasses to pick up a bag of cash from a laundrette in Birmingham – his fee for a fix – and once being threatened with a cricket bat.
Despite the darkness of his story, he has an easy charm that keeps the mood light, but you can sense the vulnerability that made him susceptible to fixers looking for recruits at a time when the game was not as well policed, and players had fewer options outside of international cricket.
‘Being alienated from my two daughters will always be the most devastating thing’
He was given a life ban and exiled from the sport – a pariah – lost his income and suffered the break-up of his marriage. “Some members of my family have been turned against me, which I have had to live with, but I have faith that time heals a lot of wounds,” he explains to Telegraph Sport. “I have to think that.
“Being alienated from my two daughters will always be the most devastating thing. And I’m hoping, over time with little bits I do in public, my girls will see that Dad made mistakes and they’ll hopefully see me as a good guy and reconnect with me.
“The other thing is just losing the guys who I played cricket with. I want to eventually go back to England to possibly give back to the game whatever way I can to rekindle some of the friendships I’ve crushed because of my involvement in fixing.
“Losing respect in the cricketing world is something that has been hard, but again, self-inflicted. I’ll never make an excuse or blame anyone else apart from myself. So we’ll see where it takes me. Today could be a start.”
New Zealand is a small place and Vincent could not hide. He ended up in Lumsden, a small, remote town in the South Island near Queenstown, in one of his attempts to start again, but his past followed him.
“I’ve had abuse. One was a guy driving past me on the side of the street in Auckland. He said: ‘Oh, f*** off, Vincent. You cheat’. And I was like: ‘Yeah, fair enough’. And the second time was down in Lumsden. Our neighbours decided to get very drunk at the pub one night. It was three of them, me, and my wife-to-be and after I bought them a drink to wish them happy New Year they decided to drink the drink and then turn around to tell me that ‘we don’t want you in this f***ing town. You’re a disgrace to New Zealand sport and you’re a cheat'. They started coming at me, pushing me out of the pub …”
The mental health spiral kicked in. “It was like the knock-on effect from the match-fixing, then the Family Court and my kids. It was very touch and go. Even four years ago I was like, ‘what’s the point in life'? Constantly getting punched and kicked down. And then it was just like, ‘hang in there’.
‘Suicide has been my mindset, even as early as when I was 27’
“Suicide has been my mindset, even as early as when I was 27. And it was always in the back of my mind. I totally understand why people do it. Because you just want a release. You want to be away from the pain. If you don’t do that, you either drink and take drugs to sort of mask it, but the powerful thing is, you just need to embrace the feeling of that depression and that anger and that hate and go through the stages of rehabilitation to a certain point of finding love for yourself because that’s the only way you can really properly heal. It’s taken many years to love myself.”
He has a strong set of friends – Joey Yovich, his old New Zealand A teammate, is sat at the table in the cafe and prompts Lou when he loses his thread. The warmth between the two is obvious. Steve Pearson, his old clubmate from Auckland, and Paul Hobbs and Heath Mills from the New Zealand Cricketers’ Association have formed a protective ring around Vincent, helping him with his mental health battles.
His work with the players union in anti-corruption education helped the lifting of his ban, along with support from McCullum. “He would have been amazing for me. I’m a buddy-loving sort of pat-on-the-shoulder kind of guy. Just go out there and win, go out there and be yourself. I think that would have been great. But New Zealand cricket during my era was very much about guys looking after themselves a little bit too much.”
Our chat is interrupted a couple of times by well-wishers, people recognise Vincent and want to shake his hand and say hello. You can sense his relief with the reaction. He was given a warm ovation at the end of his talk. “I had a couple of guys come up at the end there who said they want to hear more about what I’ve got to say. And I kind of feel like I’ve got a lot to say. Hand on heart, I told the truth. I can look in the mirror and look at anybody in the face and not shy away, whereas Lou of old had to live a fake life. And that’s worse, that’s what kills you.
‘Next moment Steve Waugh was in my face – it was like living in my own movie’
“But some of it is still hard. I see the odd legend around; even now, seeing Mike Atherton over there,” he points to the other end of the cafe. “You know forever, wherever he goes, he’s going to be a legend. He might get a bit of s*** for scoring a pair against Aussie in an Ashes test, but he didn’t fix any games and won’t be remembered for doing some really bad stuff. And it’s hard. It’s a shame, knowing what I did, and sad to know that I didn’t fulfil my complete potential as a cricketer.”
And he could play. Vincent started with a test hundred on debut at the Waca against the great Australian team of the early 2000s. “I remember taking guard and looking up and there was Glenn McGrath at the top of his mark. Got Mark Waugh and Shane Warne in the slips chewing their gum saying, ‘give us a catch, Louie’.
“Next moment Steve Waugh was right in front of my face saying, ‘nobody wants to get a duck in their first game, Lou’. And I thought, ‘how cool is that? Steve Waugh is talking to me’. It was like living in my own movie.”
He played 23 tests, 102 ODIs and nine T20 internationals. He scored two more test hundreds, but was never able to live up to that first innings and was in and out of the side, although these days a franchise league career would have softened that blow.
He was awarded his commemorative 100th ODI cap only this year, 17 years after he last played for New Zealand. It was presented by Sir Richard Hadlee in a private ceremony for family and friends.
It was hugely significant that Hadlee, the icon of New Zealand cricket, did the honours. It was a sign that Vincent remains a liked figure and there is an acceptance now of the mental health problems he dealt with all his life that were not necessarily understood when he was a player.
‘Being in the gang gave me a sense of belonging’
His parents separated when he was young, he was brought up by his father in Australia and never had a settled family life. When you know that, you understand what he means when he talks about how fixing gave him a feeling of belonging.
“I literally 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. And, you know, 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.
“If I was a little bit homesick or not scoring enough runs, I would tell the coach, the captain and then all of a sudden you get dropped because they think he’s not going to give 100% for New Zealand tomorrow because he’s a little bit lonely.
“So I didn’t have the mental package to be a professional sports player. So at 28 I was deeply in depression 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’m thinking: ‘I’m part of a match-fixing gang, I’m with a group that’s going to have my back and nobody knows our little secret.’
“I think that’s how most bike gangs work with young kids. Yeah, they sort of groom young kids into ‘we’ll look after you, but go drive that car through the shop and smash it up’.”
Vincent soon discovered the ugly side. “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. 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 literally the way I did [confess].
“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. They understood that I went to them with a pretty big booklet of information and a treasure trove of how certain things were working. And it was almost probably too much to deal with at the time.
“It’s taken a good decade, but you can’t rush healing. It is still a daily check sometimes. I call Joey and go, ‘I’ve just been tweaked by this little moment’. But those moments of going down are very short now instead of it being hours or days or weeks.”
He told the audience a funny story about his first return to the Basin this year when he was persuaded to play in a Twenty20 game. While his team were changing in the dressing room Tim Robinson, who plays for Wellington, popped in to wish them all luck.
“He was just being humble and nice, welcoming us to the ground and was like, ‘oh, geez, what an experience for you clubbies to come and play at the Basin’. Behind me was a picture of me raising my bat for my double hundred. Should I say something? No, it was a poignant thing because you never own a team, you’re just passing the baton on. My day as Lou the cricketer is gone.”
But has he still got it at the age of 46? After struggling at first, he hit five sixes in a row to win the match. They bowled one more ball, even though the game was over, to see if he could do it again. “It went even further.”
He wants to go back to Sussex and right a few wrongs. “I can’t see ever being properly welcomed back at Sussex. But as long as they know my intentions are for the good of the game and if people understand the whole story – not so much have sympathy but understanding – then you never know.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘you haven’t murdered anyone and we’ve all made silly mistakes in our life’. I like to think what Sir Richard Hadlee did by putting his hand up to give me a hug, presenting that cap to me is a massive signal to the rest of the cricketing community that ‘come on, he’s actually an okay guy. He was just young and dumb’.”
Vincent hopes to work as a mentor for young cricketers, his life story a warning, but is happy to stay out of the public eye, living close to the beach, looking after his baby son, Vinnie.
“I haven’t set an alarm for the last five years. I have coffee, go to the beach with the dogs, sit and chat. My phone hardly rings. It’s great. So, yeah, pretty boring article for you, really.”
No Lou, not a boring story. It is a fascinating tale of fallibility, manipulation and now, hopefully, recovery.