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<\/a><\/p>\nPublished On 30 Jul 202630 Jul 2026<\/p>\n
An English \u200camateur cricketer at the centre of allegations \u2060of finger-clicking \u2060trickery has been suspended and will not play \u201cfor the foreseeable future\u201d, his club has said.<\/p>\n
The fielder, dubbed \u201cClicky Ponting\u201d on social media in a punning nod to former Australia captain \u2060Ricky Ponting, allegedly tricked umpires by clicking his fingers to make the sound of a ball nicking the bat as deliveries were missed and caught by \u200cthe wicketkeeper.<\/p>\n
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The video footage went viral on social media and made international headlines.<\/p>\n
Saltburn Cricket Club, run by volunteers, said on Wednesday in a statement it was treating the allegations \u201cwith the utmost seriousness\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe player at the centre of the complaint has been suspended \u2060and will not play again \u2060for the club this season or in the foreseeable future, pending the outcome of this investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n
It said initial discussions between club \u2060officials and the North Yorkshire and South Durham league had already taken \u2060place.<\/p>\n
The league said on Tuesday \u2060it had received a formal complaint \u201cregarding alleged incidents in a Division Two game on Saturday 25th July 2026\u201d.<\/p>\n
Saltburn said it had \u200cbeen a distressing and stressful experience for all concerned and asked for \u201cpersonal boundaries\u201d to be respected.<\/p>\n
The club \u200care \u200ctop of the Division Two table with 10 wins from 15 matches.<\/p>\n
Historically, cricketers \u2013 even at the highest level of the game \u2013 have been accused of trying to trick umpires with noises, including chomping on a biscuit, to fool umpires into believing the ball hit the bat.<\/p>\n
Cricket cheating allegations have even extended to dirt being applied to the ball, for which former England captain Michael Atherton was once fined, and the use of bottle tops to scuff the ball.<\/p>\n
Both were attempts to create extra swing for the quick bowlers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saltburn\u2019s amateur cricketer at centre of cheating allegations that grabbed global headlines is suspended by club. Published On…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":832999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,2057,44,588,85,3586],"class_list":["post-832998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-europe","tag-news","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/832999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}