Lou Vincent: an extraordinary tale

This interview first appeared in the October 2010 issue of SPIN magazine

Two years ago, Lou Vincent was still one of the faces of international cricket: only recently dropped from the New Zealand side, he appeared on Sky’s Cricket AM to talk about signing for Lancashire and hit a 63-ball century in the Twenty20 Cup for them. One year ago, he was out of the picture completely: working as a tiler and a builder in Manchester, his professional career ended apparently in its prime by a rare combination of mental exhaustion and fallings-out. Now, still only 31, Vincent is talking to counties about a comeback to professional cricket in the 2011 season, by which time he will be able to play as an English-qualified player. Permanently settled in the UK with his British wife and two young children, he has been in talks with several counties and the tbc signs are that one of cricket’s forgotten men could be landing back on his feet in a fairly high-profile fashion.

When people talk about the modern age of the freelance cricketer, the gun-for-hire, they talk about Kevin Pietersen or Kieron Pollard – big names with straightforward ambitions and well-connected agents who will never want for a contract anywhere in the world.

Lou Vincent’s story is rather different. His talents as a clean-hitting batsman were never in doubt: after all, he made a century on Test debut in 2001 against a full-strength Australian attack – McGrath, Gillespie, Lee, Warne – and has a career Twenty20 strike rate of 126. But playing top-level cricket helped make Vincent depressed. Being dumped out of the international game before he was 30 did not, immediately, make him any more content. But the whole process eventually led him to re-evaluate his life and regain a hunger for the game at the highest level. “Once I’d finished with Lancashire that was it,” he says. “I ended up working on the BBC site up at Salford Quays. I did 160 apartments there, tiling the kitchens and bathrooms. I was doing it for eight months, doing some building as well. I enjoyed it in itself. I’ve always had a hammer in my hand. I’ve always built things. I’m a hands-on arty guy.

“The money wasn’t an issue. A million dollars wouldn’t have made me happy. 
You get to a point in your life where you start to question what you’ve been doing, and who you are.

“But it’s been 12 months to the day since I was putting some posts in my mates backyard, digging some holes, and I sat there and thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I’d lost my life as a cricketer, and therefore my identity; and I’d almost lost my wife.

“I’ve had this discussion with lots of cricketers, when careers suddenly fall short and they have to adjust to a normal life from being an entertainer in front of 50,000 people to digging holes or selling insurance to people who don’t know who you are … and the money goes too… It’s quite demoralising. I’ve talked about it in depth with quite a few ex-players. How do you adjust? My family life was affected, my health, everything.

“Things were sliding down hill pretty quick. But then a mate of mine pinned me up against the wall and said. ‘Mate, you’re only 30, what the fuck are you doing?”

Gradually, this summer [2010], Vincent has started heading back towards professional cricket. The comeback trail has consisted of racking up big runs (and wickets) in the Cheshire Premier League for Nantwich, and turning out for Lashings and the PCA Masters. Though these latter games tend to be fun, exhibition-type affairs, Vincent believes that being back in the milieu of pro cricket and playing with team-mates like Graeme Hick and Phil de Freitas has helped re-establish his bona fides as a man and as a player. Should his current contract talks with a county continue successfully, he won’t be short of good references.

Vincent’s life as a low-level gun-for-hire this summer has also given him the opportunity to live a lifestyle that KP or Flintoff would not necessarily have chosen but one that Vincent plainly loves. For games outside London, he’s been camping in fields and catching his own dinner.

“I’m a gypsy with a tent and a cricket bag on my back!” he says. “It’s not about saving money – it’s about the fun part of life and the scrapping and just the outdoors thing that you have as a Kiwi.

“I target certain areas. I wouldn’t camp in London because I’d probably get arrested. But I’ve had a fabulous summer of seeing England. I don’t go to campsites. So I apologise to all the farmers…”

Guerrilla camping?

“Yes: I stalk it out on Google maps, looking for water and trees. England has massive problems with the way the American red signal crays have taken over and are killing off the native fish life here. So I do my Bear Grylls impersonation and help out the community by catching them and eating them.”

Camping japes and optimism for the future notwithstanding, Vincent’s account of the last three years is a pretty dark tale that echoes the well-documented struggles with depression of, for one, Marcus Trescothick. “I don’t understand Marcus’ full story,” he says. “I know it’s partly to do with travelling away from home. To me, it was everything in the world, agonising over why I didn’t enjoy my life. It’s not the stress of playing; it’s the stress of off-the-filed stuff. But it’s not just sportsmen who go through this lull of depression, this black beast of constant anxiety. There’s a lot of pressure on everyone – pressure to earn money, to consume.

“What’s been wonderful for me is to have been rock bottom and to slowly dissect myself as a human being and work out what I want from life.”

It was in late-2007, six years into his international career, that things came to a head for Lou Vincent. He was dropped by New Zealand. He went public on his struggle with depression and never wanted to play cricket again. And then the Indian Cricket League offered an apparent way out: a contract to play short tournaments in India throughout 2008, ideal for a man at once jaded by the 12-month-grind of cricket and still trying to support his family. As it turned out, though, the ICL would be just another step towards rock bottom.

“In December 2007, I got back from the ODI tour of Australia and I knew it had been my last game for New Zealand. I went back and played for my club second team with all my mates. But I literally couldn’t hit the ball; I was a complete nervous wreck. And eventually they stopped sledging me because they felt sorry for me. They ended up bowling me full tosses. It was the weirdest feeling in the world. I thought, ‘That’s it. This life has just killed you.’

“So my choice was to fix my personal well-being and my family life rather than the cricket issue. But then the ICL came up to me and offered me a three-year contract. I saw it as a kind of pension. And we packed up and left New Zealand within the week.

How much longer would he have played for New Zealand had they had not dropped him? “Maybe one more game. Something had to change and I had to get away from it. People take sabbaticals. But it’s taken me two years to realise how much I miss it.”

He doesn’t miss everything about top-level cricket. Being dropped in 2006 still rankles. “They told me they were looking for technically correct opening batsmen then they picked two guys who’d never opened before!” he says, still dismayed. “We were poorly managed by that New Zealand set-up,” he says. Look what’s happened to New Zealand cricket in the last four years.
I can’t even name the team now. You’re missing that generation of senior players through the damage that was done.”

A straight reading of the chronology of Vincent’s career might suggest that it was signing for the ICL that finally put the kibosh on Vincent’s chances. He played in three ICL tournaments throughout 2008 and was, like fellow ‘rebel league’ players including the likes of Brian Lara and Shane Bond, ultimately effectively ostracised from official cricket.

As it happens, though, those repercussions of signing for the ICL were secondary for Vincent who felt that his career was virtually finished anyway. “ICL was great for the first tournament, the whole buzz of it,” he says. “Then gradually I started to see its weaknesses and it was horrible. Just the disorganisation of it and the nature of the cricket. Socially it was great: I met some fantastic players from Australia and South Africa and I made some good friends. But I ended up hating it.”

One of those new friends, Stuart Law, helped get Vincent his contract with Lancashire in 2008. Vincent’s scores were good, in the T20 at least, but his heart wasn’t in it. There was still something wrong and he managed to sabotage any chance of re-engagement by putting coach Mike Watkinson straight on a few matters – in front of the rest of the team.

“We’d been beaten by nine wickets by Worcester and the team talk afterwards was short and about taking the positives and ‘See you all tomorrow’. But I put my hand up and said, ‘We’re one of the biggest counties isn England and we’ve been beaten by a second division team, this is a bit of a shambles really…’

“And I made my opinion about the whole organisation of training and preparation clear. So I shot myself in the foot, really. I didn’t really understand how county cricket operates. I probably should have spoken to the management privately.”

Vincent was not re-engaged.

The unofficial ban on ICL-linked players now apparently ended, Vincent has been in talks about a return to full-time professional cricket. Vincent has not played a first-class game since August 2008 but started his comeback last winter in the Auckland side that reached both pyjama-form finals and dipped his toe with three T20 games for Northants this summer, fixed through his old ICL team-mate Andrew Hall.

Vincent thinks there is more to come and as an England-qualified player unlikely to be called away for international duties, several counties are pondering whether he may prove a canny signing. “A lot of people will look at me and go, ‘Not another foreigner playing over here as a local.’ But I’d say, ‘Hold on a sec – this is my home.’ I understand that the British want to see a born-and-bred Andrew Flintoff. But if you’re an insurance salesman and you go to New Zealand, people don’t say you can’t have a job; you’re welcomed into that community.

“I think I’ve got five or six solid years left in me to get the most out of entertaining people. My dream is to be part of a successful team. That’s it. Be a huge part of rebuilding a team to become a successful No 1 team.”

World’s top cricketers pick up tiny new bat

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News that some of the world’s top cricketers are considering using a bat that is 33 per cent smaller (yes: 33 per cent smaller) than the standard will be filtering onto the wires today.

I first heard about the Mongoose back in February when I met its inventor Marcus Codrington Fernandez. I’ve been following his progress ever since as he looks to persuade the world to use a bat that’s effectively six inches ‘too short’. We have a four-page feature on his mission in the July issue of SPIN, coming out on June 5.

The theory is this: 1) batsmen hardly ever use the very top part of their bat – and certainly not to play attacking shots and score runs with. 2) If you take all that ‘wasted’ wood from the top part of the bat, you can use it further down in the blade, making the (shorter) blade as thick as a brick and more powerful. 3) In having a longer handle, the blade has more ‘whip’. Though the bat is more powerful, it is the same overall weight as a conventional bat – but in effect feels lighter, because the longer handle offers greater leverage.

Codrington Fernandez and his partners at Hunts County bats have also devised a way to not have the splice within the blade – so the blade of the Mongoose is pure hitting area, pure sweet spot. Tests at Imperial College have shown all this, apparently, to be true. 

Reaction within the game – as Codrington Fernandez has trawled the off-season county grounds showing his wares to players – has been generally positive, despite pockets of scorn. Pietersen, Flintoff, Mascarenhas and Yuvraj Singh have all seen it, as have representatives of at least one major IPL team.

Bat deals are complicated (and expensive) yet Codrington Fernandez has two of the world’s top one-day players on board for his launch at Lord’s this morning, namely Stuart Law and Lou Vincent, as well as the England women players Laura Marsh and Ebony Rainford-Brent. (He thinks the bat could revolutionise the women’s game.)

Law is already using a version of the Mongoose in one-day games for Derbyshire – not quite an extreme a version as the headline product, it’s true, but still a bat with a blade that is an inch shorter than usual, and no splice within the blade. He hit 95 with it against Essex the other week.

“People will see this as a gimmick – until they actually use it and feel the difference it creates,” Law told me last week. “If you look at a lot of the slower pitches around the world, places like the sub-continent where the ball doesn’t really bounce above waist high. The guys over there, like MS Dhoni, increase their bat speed with massive heavy bats. Well, this is going to double it.”

The bat has been approved by the MCC and has its official launch at Lord’s this morning.

It is understood Codrington Fernandez is in advanced stages of talks with a player to use it in the men’s ICC World Twenty20 tournament. Law, meanwhile, has committed to using it in at least some part of his innings against Durham in the Twenty20 Cup on Tuesday.

Despite the surge of publicity – with an appearance on BBC Breakfast News and the Today programme – Mongoose is a cottage industry and is not geared up with thousands of bats in stock. Rather, initially, each order will be custom-made which, at a price of £159, is a deal that compares favourably with other top-of-the-range bats.

We’ll have a full feature on the development of the Mongoose and Marcus Codrington Fernandez’s mission in the next issue of SPIN.

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