Former New Zealand batter Lou Vincent recounted his tale of falling from grace following his involvement in match-fixing during his time at the now defunct Indian Cricket League (ICL) in the late 2000s, saying that the incident made him a pariah, both professionally and personally, and eventually costed in alienating him from his daughters.

Vincent, who represented New Zealand in 23 Tests and 108 ODI, was handed 11 life bans by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2014 for match-fixing. Last year, the ban was revised allowing him to be involved in domestic cricket.

The 46-year-old had started his career with a Test hundred on debut against the mighty Australian side of the 2000s. As he fought depression and got involved in match-fixing, his promising international career came to a premature end at the age of 29.

In an interview with ‘The Telegraph’, Vincent opened up on the struggles after being exiled from the sport that subsequently led to loss of respect in the cricketing world, and his separation from his wife, and his daughters.

“Some members of my family have turned against me, which I have had to live with, but I have faith that time heals a lot of wounds. I have to think about 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,” he said.

“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,” he hoped.

Vincent also narrated how his early upbringing impacted his personality and career.

“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,” he admitted.

“I felt like I was part of a gang. It almost made me feel better, because I am 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.’

“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’.”

Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, Vincent said he was always looking for emotional support around him and ended up finding that in the murky world of corruption.

“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,” he conceded.

However, it did not take long for Vincent to realise the dangers of being part of the “gang”.

“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),” added Vincent, who scored six hundreds across formats in his six-year international career.

A decade after he was banned by the ECB, Vincent has healed and made peace with his past.

“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 was great to deal with.

“It’s taken a good decade but you can’t rush healing. It is still a daily check sometimes. But those moments of going down are very short now instead of it being hours or days or weeks,” said Vincent, who is currently involved in the anti-corruption education initiatives of New Zealand players’ body.