Eight catches and a 39-to-5 split: the numbers behind cricket’s ‘Clicky Ponting’ row
A slip fielder in an English league second XI is accused of clicking his fingers to fake edges. The scorecards ended up doing more damage than the video did.
Jul 29, 2026
Club cricket does not usually trend. This week it has, because of a sound.
The clip that started it is a few seconds long. A bowler runs in during a second XI game in the North Yorkshire and South Durham League, the ball passes the bat with daylight between the two, and the keeper and first slip go up together. The umpire’s finger goes up with them. Noman Shabir, the batter, protests, points down the pitch towards the fielder, and gets nowhere.
The accusation is that the sound the umpire acted on did not come from the bat. It came from the slip fielder clicking his fingers.
One clip became a pattern
Ben Mummery posted the original video on X on 27 July, calling it the worst case of cheating he had seen in cricket. That alone would have been a bad afternoon for the club involved. What turned it into an investigation was everything that came afterwards.
Other users started pulling up more footage and, more damagingly, scorecards from Play Cricket, the public results site English club cricket runs on. The dismissals kept looking the same. The fielder at the centre of it has been nicknamed “Clicky Ponting” online, which is the sort of thing the internet does to a story before the governing body has finished reading the complaint.
Saltburn CC, the club in question, beat Norton CC by 159 runs in the second XI fixture that produced the original clip, and sit 17 points clear at the top of Division Two. The North Yorkshire and South Durham league has since launched a formal investigation. Its statement is brief and gives nothing away: a formal complaint about a Division Two game on Saturday, a full investigation initiated, no further comment until the process is finished.
Eight catches in a match, in a game where seven is the Test record
Here is where it stops being funny. In Saltburn’s match before that one, against Shildon Railway CC, their second XI wicketkeeper took eight catches. Eight. The Test record for catches by a keeper in an innings is seven, shared by a handful of the best gloves the game has produced against the best bowling attacks it has assembled.
That keeper has been averaging close to four catches a match across eight games this season. In club second XI cricket, on club tracks, with club bowlers. Any one of those numbers is a good season. Together they are the kind of thing a statistician notices from a long way off.
39 and 5
The number that has done the most damage is a split an X user published on 28 July. Sorted by whether the slip fielder, Brian Devine, was in the side, Saltburn’s second XI recorded 39 keeper catches in the 13 matches he played and 5 in the seven he did not.
That gap is not a hot streak. Keeper catches are lumpy and small samples lie, but a side does not average three a game with one player present and under one without him unless something in the process has changed. It is not proof of anything on its own, and the league investigation exists precisely because a spreadsheet is not a verdict. It is, though, the reason this went from a funny video to a formal complaint in about a day.
Rory Cotterill, who captained Middlesbrough’s second XI in a 29-run defeat at Saltburn in June, has since posted footage alleging two further incidents in that game. Both, he says, involved teenagers, a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old. The league has ruled on none of it yet.
Why a Saturday league game matters
Recreational cricket runs almost entirely on the assumption that nobody is trying it on. There is no DRS at a Division Two second XI ground, no snicko, usually no neutral umpires. Half the leagues in England still use club umpires standing in their own side’s fixtures. The whole structure holds together because players are expected to walk, or at least not to actively manufacture a dismissal.
That is what makes this uncomfortable rather than merely daft. A batter given out caught behind off a finger click has no review to fall back on and no way of proving the noise came from ten yards away. He just walks off. If the allegations stand up, a run of batters walked off for nothing across a whole season.
The league will work through its process and the outcome will land eventually. However it goes, a lot of club umpires are going to spend the rest of this summer listening a little harder.