“By then, I’d given up on cricket and where I was going in life”
He added: “I might have beaten a few tests in the past two-and-a-half years but it got me when I was heading for destruction.”
Taylor had said on Twitter that he had made the trip to India thinking a businessman wanted to discuss sponsorships and “the potential launch of a T20 competition in Zimbabwe”. In the interview, he expanded a little more on his meetings with the group, saying that they entertained him for three days and gifted him a mobile phone. It was on the final evening that the cocaine use occurred.
Of the next morning, when they turned up at his hotel room, he said: “Two bigger guys were always lurking, circling me. It felt very claustrophobic around my personal space. I was scared for my own safety. I’d fallen for it. I’d willingly walked into a situation that has changed my life for ever.”
He pointed once again to his circumstances at the time, with Zimbabwe’s cricketing future uncertain, and his own as a result, and that he had not been paid for six months. “I was six months with no salary, there were rumours we wouldn’t be allowed to play for two years, and all I was trying to do was put food on the table. Prepare for life after playing.
“That’s why I went. I’d told them on numerous occasions that if there was any skulduggery, they shouldn’t waste time in getting me over there. That I was not wired that way.”
Taylor spoke of his struggles with addiction in his original Twitter post and said he was due to check into a rehabilitation centre today. “l owe it to myself and to my family to get clean and to put them first,” he had said. “I have let a substance take control of me and impair my vision, my morals and my values and it is time that I prioritise what really matters.”