‘It probably wasn’t nice’: Ricky Ponting breaks silence after his name was used in UK’s viral ‘Clicky Ponting’ cheating scandal originally appeared on Cricket News.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Ricky Ponting has broken his silence over the “Clicky Ponting” nickname that emerged from a UK amateur cricket cheating scandal.
- A Division Two match in Yorkshire went viral after footage appeared to show a fielder clicking fingers to fake an edge sound.
- The former Australia captain says he didn’t want to give the story more oxygen but admitted it wasn’t pleasant having his name linked to cheating.
Ricky Ponting reacts after viral UK club cricket cheating scandal dubs fielder ‘Clicky Ponting’
Ricky Ponting has finally spoken about one of the more unusual headlines his name has ever appeared in, and he took it with a fair amount of good humour, even if the association clearly stung a little.
It started with a Division Two fixture in the North Yorkshire and South Durham League, where Saltburn CC’s second XI beat Norton CC by an emphatic 159 runs. On the surface, just another result in a mid-table club game, but what came next, though, turned it into something considerably bigger.
Several videos surfaced online that appeared to show a suspicious pattern in the caught-behind dismissals during the match, with footage suggesting a fielder was clicking his fingers to manufacture the sound of a bat edge.
This seemingly convinced the umpire to raise the finger. The clip spread fast, and before long the whole episode had a name: “Clickgate”, and then another one: “Clicky Ponting.”
@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@TailendersPodpic.twitter.com/iM7lZfKF5q— Ben Mummery🇮🇹❤️🤍 (@ben_mummery) July 27, 2026
Why did Ricky Ponting’s name get attached to the scandal?
The nickname is simple enough in construction as “Clicky” rhymes neatly with “Ricky” and describes the alleged offence. But it wasn’t just any famous Ricky that English cricket reached for. It was Ponting, specifically, because his name already carried a particular weight in the English cricketing imagination.
He remains the most recognisable symbol of Australian dominance pursued with a whatever-it-takes edge. The image of Ponting as a captain who demanded every decision, squeezed every inch of advantage and treated the opposition’s sense of fairness as a problem to exploit.
In an interview with The Athletic, Ponting finally reacted: “I saw the headline, and I thought, ‘What’s this all about?'”
He was bombarded with media requests but chose not to engage, preferring not to give the story any extra legs.
“I clicked on the video and watched it. I got 50 calls probably from different journalists wanting me to talk about it, and I just let it go,” he said.
“I didn’t want to give it any more fuel than it needed, and it went away pretty quickly. I took it as a pun. I didn’t take any more out of it than that.”
Nonetheless, he was more measured when addressing the actual sting of it a few months later.
“It probably wasn’t nice having your name associated with someone who was deliberately cheating, but that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it. I’ll let that one through to the keeper,” he said.
The nickname says more about Ponting’s legacy than the scandal itself
The “Clicky Ponting” joke is actually quite revealing, and not just about a club match in Yorkshire. The fact that English cricket chose Ponting’s name, out of all the famous Rickys available, says something about how durable his reputation has remained, and how deeply the Sydney Test of 2008 against India lodged itself in the collective memory of opposition fans.
Nobody would have made the same joke about Ricky Gervais. The name only works because Ponting’s image as cricket’s great win-at-all-costs captain is still completely intact, even years after he last held a bat professionally.
That’s not entirely fair to Ponting, of course. He was an exceptional cricketer who drove his team to remarkable heights, and plenty of his competitiveness was simply that. But reputations in sport are built on moments, not averages, and the moments that defined Ponting for English audiences were almost always confrontational ones.
The Trent Bridge tirade, the Sourav Ganguly dismissal, the perpetual air of barely-contained fury when decisions went the wrong way, those images have outlasted the centuries and the trophies.
Ponting’s decision to stay quiet about the nickname was probably the right call. Engaging with it would have kept it alive longer, and his “through to the keeper” sign-off was exactly the right blend of dignity and self-awareness.
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