Brian Devine Faked an Edge With His Fingers — Now ‘Clicky Ponting’ Is Banned Until 2028

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape, because this tape has a soundtrack, and the soundtrack is the crime. Saturday, July 25, a Division Two match in the North Yorkshire and South Durham Cricket League: Saltburn’s second XI against Norton. Sam Morrison comes in to bowl. Noman Shabir, facing his first delivery of the day, swings and misses — the ball passes the bat without touching it and settles in wicketkeeper Josh Bowes’s gloves. And at the precise moment the ball goes past the edge, there is a click. A small, sharp, bat-on-ball click. The umpire hears an edge, the appeal goes up, and Shabir is given out, caught behind, first ball. He pleads his case with the official, and then he walks off. The click did not come from his bat. On the footage — the footage that would be watched more than 7.5 million times — it comes from first slip, where Brian Devine is standing with his fingers ready. Every Rewind grades the tape that exists. This tape is a club cricketer manufacturing a sound, and on Friday the bill for manufacturing it arrived: a two-year ban from all cricket, and his club relegated.

The cheapest device in sport

Understand what there was to buy here, because the inventory is the joke. Ball tampering takes sandpaper, planning and a pocket to hide both in. A bent umpire takes money. This took fingers. Devine needed no equipment, no accomplice and no rehearsal anybody has ever found — just timing: one click, synced to a passing ball, loud enough for an umpire standing yards away to mistake it for the thinnest edge in cricket, the nick through to the keeper that is the hardest dismissal in the game for an official to be sure about. Shabir knew. The footage shows him arguing the point before he goes, a man explaining to an umpire that a sound is not a shot. The umpire had heard what he had heard. That is the whole mechanism of the fraud, and it is also why it worked: cricket runs on that sound. Batsmen walk on it. Appeals are built on it. Generations of fielders have shouted for catches off pads and fresh air, but the noise itself was sacred — the one witness nobody cross-examined. Devine is accused of forging the witness.

7.5 million people heard the click

The clip might have stayed a league argument. Instead Norton player Ben Mummery posted it on July 27 with a caption that did the prosecution’s work in one breath: “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.” The video has since passed 7.5 million views, per Sky Sports, and the internet did what the internet does with a villain it can name in two words: it named him after a great. Ricky Ponting, the former Australia captain, a famously sharp slip fielder and catcher of everything — and so Brian Devine of Saltburn second XI became ‘Clicky Ponting.’ Former England player Tom Banton, asked about it, threaded the needle the whole sport has been threading since July: “It’s interesting, kind of clever in a way. But I cannot vouch for things like that, it’s not acceptable.” Kind of clever. Not acceptable. Both halves of that sentence are why this story would not die: everybody who watched the clip understood it instantly, admired the nerve for half a second, and then remembered a man had been given out, first ball, by a noise.

The keeper had eight catches in a match

And then came the second receipt, the one that turned a viral clip into an investigation. Earlier that same summer, Saltburn played Shildon Railway, and in that match Saltburn’s wicketkeeper took eight catches. Eight. The context is what convicts the number: no wicketkeeper in the history of Test cricket — the five-day game, a century and a half of it, the best keepers who ever lived — has taken more than seven catches in an innings. A club keeper in North Yorkshire had apparently taken eight in one club match, for a side whose first slip has since accepted a misconduct charge built on faked edges. At the time of the July match, Saltburn’s second XI sat top of Division Two, having won 10 of their 15 matches. The league, to its credit, did not grade the clip the way social media graded it. It opened a formal investigation — and further footage emerged in the reporting, allegedly showing Devine repeating the finger-click in a match for Pudsey St Lawrence in the Bradford Premier League, a claim that club answered by saying it had never been aware of any alleged misconduct and no concerns had ever been raised with it. That footage is an allegation in the record, and this piece carries it as one. The charges Devine actually accepted are the Saltburn ones, and they are enough.

Interviews, statements, three people and the tape

The North Yorkshire and South Durham league’s process is the grown-up part of this story, so it gets its full weight here. The investigation took weeks. It included player interviews. It included written statements. And it put the footage in front of a three-person disciplinary panel, which reviewed it in detail — the same clip the internet had rendered its verdict on in an afternoon, examined the slow way, by people who had to sign the outcome. Saltburn moved first against their own player: the club suspended Devine for the rest of the 2026 season while the process ran, saying at the time that he would not play again for the club that season or in the foreseeable future. When the charges came, both Devine and Saltburn admitted them — accepted the misconduct charges, in ESPNcricinfo’s wording. What they appealed was only the sanction. A separate appeal panel sat on October 26, and on Friday, November 6, the league published where all of it had landed.

The bill

Read the bill in full, because its completeness is the story. Brian Devine is suspended from all cricket under the jurisdiction of the England and Wales Cricket Board for two years, from September 30, 2026 to September 29, 2028. And “all cricket” means all of it: not just playing, but coaching, umpiring, scoring and managing junior teams — every chair a club cricketer can sit in, emptied. Saltburn are fined £300. Their second XI are relegated from Division Two to Division Three of the league. And when the 2027 season begins, that relegated side will start it on a 60-point deduction — the punishment is not finished when the season starts; it is waiting at the gate. Middlesbrough Cricket Club’s second XI, who had gone down instead, retain their place in Division Two. Saltburn’s response was short and it accepted the outcome whole: “The club fully participated in the disciplinary proceedings and accept the decision of the appeal following the original decision from the League. We are now focusing on preparations for the 2027 season.” Preparations, in their case, begin 60 points behind everybody else.

Grade the trick, not the man’s life

One part of the league’s closing statement belongs in this piece in full, because the Rewind’s rules are the same as the league’s. “The League recognises the strain this has placed on many people, especially those who were abused online and in person,” it said. “We ask everyone to respect that the formal process is now complete. The league will make no further comment.” That is carried here exactly as written, and it binds the comedy. Devine is an amateur — a club player who, when the Daily Mail reached him in the summer, said he could not comment because he was at work. The donkey act is the click, the manufactured sound, the wicket that never happened, and a sanction so complete it follows his club into a season he will not play in. That is plenty. The process has run, the charges were admitted, the appeal was heard, and nobody needs a pile-on to finish a job a three-person panel already finished properly.

THE VERDICT — After review: the donkey is a finger click. No sandpaper, no ball-tampering kit, no equipment at all — just a man at first slip manufacturing the sound of a wicket and a club season built, in part, on catches that started with that sound. The league did this one properly: interviews, statements, three people watching the footage, charges admitted, an appeal heard, and a bill that lands on the player and the club in the same envelope — banned until 2028, relegated, minus-60 before a ball is bowled in 2027. The trick was cheap. The tape was free. And the tape, as always, was undefeated.