How a cricketer clicking his fingers sparked a global sporting scandal

It’s a viral scandal from the stereotypically genteel and gentle world of English village cricket.

It has made headlines around the world, been decried by Piers Morgan and become the subject of some extraordinary internet sleuthing.

Welcome to ‘Clicky Ponting’ or, if you are a fan of a slightly more niche reference, ‘Snapil Dev’ (references to former cricketers Ricky Ponting and Kapil Dev).

It all stems from an amateur match played in the north of England, specifically the North Yorkshire and South Durham league’s Division Two game last Saturday between Saltburn Cricket Club Second XI and Norton Cricket Club.

We join the action as Saltburn bowler Sam Morrison trundles in and sends down a delivery to Norton batter Noman Shabir. The ball appears to go past the edge of Shabir’s bat and into wicketkeeper Josh Bowes’ gloves.

The fielders, though, have heard something: they think Shabir hit the ball, appeal to the umpire and he gives the batter out, caught behind.

Shabir appears flabbergasted. His initial reaction is to point at the first-slip fielder, and he then protests to the umpire, all to no avail. The Saltburn players celebrate as normal. They went on to win the game by 159 runs, cementing their position at the top of the Division Two table.

And that’s where the sleuthing began.

An amateur cricketer called Ben Mummery posted a clip on social media, zoomed in on the fielder standing at first slip — the nearest position behind the wicketkeeper and to his right. This clip appears to show this fielder clicking his fingers at the moment the ball goes past the edge of the bat, which could easily have made it sound like there had been contact between the two, thus tricking the umpire into giving Shabir out.

The logical conclusion is that the fielder was clicking his fingers deliberately to try to deceive the umpire into thinking the batter had hit the ball when he hadn’t.

@Saltburncc First slip clicks his fingers to imitate an edge, bat nowhere near it and given out.
This is about the worst case of cheating I’ve ever seen in cricket.
Apparently, their keeper has a huge amount of catches this season.@talkSPORT @bbctms @SkyCricket @TailendersPod pic.twitter.com/iM7lZfKF5q

— Ben Mummery (@ben_mummery) July 27, 2026

Then, more sleuthing: further clips were posted of other Saltburn games which appeared to show the same fielder doing the same thing — clicking his fingers as the ball passed the bat, to give the impression the batter had hit it.

Others went through the records of Saltburn matches to discover how many times opposition batters had been given out caught behind. In one recent game, that number reached eight, which is incredibly high (the record for dismissals by this method in a single Test match innings is seven).

Some satisfied themselves with coming up with as many cricket-related puns to apply to the incident as possible.

The incident was then reported to the league, which confirmed on Monday that it was initiating “a full investigation”.

What is claimed to be the name of the fielder in question has since appeared on social media, but The Athletic has been unable, at the time of writing, to definitively verify his identity. He did not respond when contacted by The Athletic. He has been named by the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, which reports a local Indian restaurant that sponsors the player declared itself “disgusted” by the clips.

When contacted by The Athletic, Norton CC referred all questions to the league. The league did not respond to a request for comment. It did release a statement on Monday which said: “The league have received a formal complaint regarding alleged incidents in a Division Two game on Saturday. A full investigation has been initiated, and until such time as the formal processes are complete, no further comment will be made.”

The Athletic contacted several representatives of Saltburn Cricket Club, none of whom had responded at the time of writing.

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This is, given the level of cricket involved, a relatively low-wattage incident, but there are echoes of similar scandals in the sport — most notably ‘Sandpapergate’ when, during a 2018 Test match against South Africa, Australia batter Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera applying sandpaper to the ball in order to alter its condition, making it more difficult to hit when bowled.

Bancroft, Australia’s captain Steve Smith and their vice-captain David Warner were all subsequently banned from international cricket for between nine and 12 months.

It also called to mind the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal in baseball, when they were found guilty of using an array of audio cues, most notoriously banging on a trash can, to relay pitch signs from the opposition’s catcher to their hitters. The Astros were fined $5million (£3.75m), and both manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow were suspended from all baseball activities for a year.

The Saltburn incident is a particularly 2026 ‘scandal’.

Clicking your fingers to give the impression of ball hitting bat is something anyone who has played cricket at any level will be familiar with, although typically during pre-match messing around, rather than during competitive games. But in previous years there has been no way of being sure if it has happened during play, so who knows how many people have done it at amateur levels and got away with it?

It has come to light this time because of something called a FrogBox, which is essentially a fixed camera that films games at this level of cricket.

Clubs who are registered with Play-Cricket, a website which collates the scorecards and records of amateur teams in England, have the option to install a FrogBox at their ground, and the footage is then available for streaming and uploaded to Play-Cricket. You can browse scorecards from each game, and watch replays of individual wickets: here is the scorecard for the match in question.

There is then the interesting question of how this is technically cheating.

“Clicking your fingers to deceive the umpire into thinking a batter has hit the ball when they haven’t” is one of those things that obviously is cheating, but it’s such a strange and rare occurrence that there isn’t actually anything specific in the Laws of Cricket that prohibits it.

Law 41.4 says that a deliberate attempt to distract a batter should result in a five-run penalty to the batting team, but that’s not quite what this is.

Law 41.2 — ‘unfair actions’ — is probably the section that would be most applicable, given that this is a catch-all provision that states “the umpires shall be the sole judges of fair and unfair play”, and essentially says that if anything occurs on the field that the umpires deem to be unfair, then they can take appropriate action, in the form of a warning or a five-run penalty.

All of that is if such an incident was caught on the field of play, though. Saltburn and the player in question are being investigated retrospectively by the league, meaning in theory they will be judged against the North Yorkshire and South Durham league’s General Conduct Regulations.

Again, there is no specific provision made in that code for the clicking of fingers, but there are four levels of misconduct listed.

Even clearer, watch his left hand, this was from last year when they needed 1 wicket and the other team needed 4 runs. pic.twitter.com/ukiiJZtmXl

— Zacbfc (@Zacbfc1233) July 27, 2026

Level four involves acts of actual violence, so it probably won’t be that. Level three includes reference to “intimidating an umpire by language or gesture”, which doesn’t quite feel fitting but, if stretched, deception like this could be classed as a form of intimidation. Level two includes ‘rule 1.m’, which says a player shall be disciplined if they commit “any other misconduct, the nature of which is, in the opinion of the umpires, equivalent to a level-two offence”.

The code states that punishments can range from a seven-day ban and £50 fine for a first-time, level-one offence, up to a one-year ban and £250 fine for a third offence in the space of two years. The league did not respond when asked for guidance on how this incident will be judged.

So now we wait to discover what will become of Saltburn Cricket Club and their players.

This incident, while at a low level, has been the talk of cricket in England for a few days. It’s been all over social media too, and anyone involved in a cricket-related WhatsApp group cannot have failed to know all about it and probably involved themselves in giddy dissection of the incident, analysing the footage like it’s the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

It might depress those at the top of the English game that this has been the hot topic, rather than their flagship tournament, The Hundred, which is theoretically happening somewhere in the country right now.