The Daily Mail door-knocked Brian Devine’s family members over a finger click in Division Two cricket. Piers Morgan called a 38-year-old amateur cricketer the biggest cheat in cricket history. A local Indian restaurant pulled a sponsorship worth £1,000 a year. Saltburn Cricket Club, a volunteer-run organisation, had to beg the public for “personal boundaries” in an official statement.
The response to click-gate has crossed every reasonable line for a recreational cricket controversy.
Brian Devine, Saltburn CC’s opening batsman and first slip fielder, was caught on camera appearing to click his fingers as the ball passed the outside edge of a Norton batsman’s bat during a Division Two match in the North Yorkshire and South Durham League on July 25. The sound mimicked a thin edge. The umpire gave the batsman out. The clip, first posted by Durham amateur cricketer Ben Mummery on X, has been viewed over 7.5 million times.
@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
The footage is damning. Online analysis showed Saltburn’s wicketkeeper Josh Bowes took 31 catches in eight matches with Devine in the side, compared to five in five matches without him. In one game against Shildon Railway, Bowes took eight catches in a single innings. No Test wicketkeeper in 150 years has taken more than seven.
Saltburn suspended Devine on July 29 and stated he would not play again “this season or in the foreseeable future.” The club conceded their next match against Marton. The NYSD League launched a formal investigation. Those are proportionate consequences for a serious breach of the spirit of the game.
What followed was not proportionate.
“people have been invoking Sharia law. The bastions of morality have been saying this is the worst cheating I’ve ever seen. The Daily Mail door-knocking family members, journalists getting upset that this guy has not responded to comment and that his work has not allowed him to contact the Daily Mail.”
Sam Perry, The Grade Cricketer, July 30, 2026
Perry’s assessment cuts to the core of how the saltburn clicking scandal daily mail coverage spiralled beyond accountability. National newspapers sent reporters to track down a village cricketer. When Devine was reached at his workplace, his response said everything about the absurdity of the situation.
“Naturally, I cannot comment on that. I also cannot answer any questions because I am currently at work.”
Brian Devine, to the Daily Mail, July 29, 2026
A man at his day job, fielding calls from national media about a Saturday afternoon cricket match. The Daily Mail reported he lost his personal sponsorship from Spices, a local Indian restaurant that paid him £1,000 per season. The restaurant’s owner, Akmol Hussain, told BBC Sport that Spices sponsors the club, not individual players, and would continue doing so pending the investigation. Even the sponsorship story was more complicated than the headlines suggested.
Piers Morgan was not interested in complications.
“Outrageous cheating, and just the tip of the iceberg from all that’s come out since it was exposed. Clicky Ponting (as he is now known) and various teammates at Saltburn CC have clearly been at this shameful scam for years. Imagine doing this in local amateur cricket? Pathetic.”
Piers Morgan, X, July 28, 2026
Morgan called Devine the biggest cheat in cricket history. In a sport where Hansie Cronje fixed matches for money, where Mohammad Amir bowled deliberate no-balls in a Lord’s Test, where Cameron Bancroft used sandpaper on the ball in an international match in Cape Town, a village cricketer clicking his fingers in Division Two of the NYSD League is the worst of all time. That claim tells you more about the person making it than the person it is aimed at.
The Grade Cricketer offered to pay for what the mob wanted to take
While the media piled on, Australian cricket media company The Grade Cricketer went the other direction. According to journalist Tom Morris, TGC wrote to Saltburn CC offering to fund Brian Devine’s legal representation. They offered financial assistance to cover any sponsorship or commercial losses the club suffered. They also contacted the NYSD League directly, offering to fund umpire recruitment and development through a proposed initiative.
Australian media company the @gradecricketer has written to Saltburn CC, offering to assist in funding legal representation for Brian Devine (the now infamous village cricket clicker who is being referred to as ‘Clicky Ponting’).
Believe TGC has also offered financial… https://t.co/qasgZ0p9aa
— Tom Morris (@tommorris32) July 29, 2026
Three offers. All addressing the actual problems created by the scandal rather than amplifying the noise around it.
Saltburn’s own statement reflected a club under siege.
“This has been a very distressing and stressful experience for all those concerned, and we would ask that this reality is borne in mind and that personal boundaries are respected, as we are an amateur Club entirely run by volunteers.”
Saltburn Cricket Club, statement, July 29, 2026
A volunteer-run cricket club asking the public for personal boundaries. That sentence should not need to exist in response to a Division Two cricket match.
Insider Read
Every cricketer who has stood at first slip in a Saturday league match knows the slips cordon is not a quiet place. There is chat, there is movement, there are noises. Hands clap together on reflex. Fingers click when a ball beats the bat. The line between instinct and intent is thinner than anyone watching a 15-second clip on social media can appreciate.
That does not excuse what Devine did. The statistical evidence alone, 31 keeper catches in eight matches versus five without him, points to something systematic rather than accidental. Clicking your fingers to fabricate an edge is cheating. It is not gamesmanship. It is not banter. It is not a grey area. It is deliberate deception of an umpire, and every player who has competed at any level understands the difference between trying something on and rigging the outcome.
But the conversation that should follow this scandal is not about destroying one amateur cricketer. It is about the systems that allowed it to happen unchecked for what appears to have been an entire season or longer.
Village cricket umpires are overwhelmingly volunteer or player-umpires standing in because their league cannot recruit enough qualified officials. They are making decisions with no technology, no replays, no second opinion. When a ball passes the bat and they hear a noise, they trust what their ears tell them. That is the vulnerability Devine exploited, and it is a vulnerability that exists in every amateur league in every cricket-playing country.
The real question click-gate should be forcing is whether domestic cricket at every level needs some form of review system. Not the full DRS apparatus of international cricket with Hawk-Eye and UltraEdge. But even the most basic video review, the kind that already exists because these matches are streamed on the ECB’s Play Cricket platform, would have caught this immediately. The footage that exposed Devine was sitting on a public platform the entire time. If a review system had flagged even one dubious dismissal mid-season, the pattern would have collapsed before it became a global story.
TGC’s offer to fund umpire recruitment addresses the root cause. More qualified umpires means better decision-making, which means less room for exploitation. That is a constructive response to a genuine problem. Door-knocking a player’s family and calling him the worst cheat in 150 years of cricket history is not.
Devine cheated. He has been suspended. An investigation is underway. Those are the consequences a Division Two cricket scandal warrants. What it does not warrant is a national media campaign against a volunteer cricket club and the family of an amateur player.
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