Dustin Melton: Ex-Derbyshire seamer using personal struggles to aid coaching

The debilitating effect of injuries is something Melton knows all too well.

During a trial at Derbyshire in 2019, he tore his side in a second XI game against Worcestershire but his four wickets that day impressed and, once fit again, he eventually earned a contract – and a first-class debut against the touring Australians.

Surgery to remove excess bone growth in his ankle followed but when the joint gave way again during a training session in 2021, Melton’s frustration boiled over.

After years of toil against injury, and the personal devastation at the loss of his birth mother, whom he never got to meet, and adoptive father saw him unload his pain in an emotional social media post that went viral.

Melton described the response he got from that as “quite overwhelming”.

“It’s something I didn’t actually really expect,” he said.

“I think when I sat there dealing with all the raw emotion I just felt like there were other people going through what I was and I felt like it would have been an opportunity to see true, real emotion that, in particular, men don’t really show very often.

“I thought it would be an opportunity to just be like ‘it’s okay everyone does suffer a little bit and it’s okay to express yourself’.

“I had plenty of team-mates say ‘thank you for opening up I’ve really been struggling with various anxieties’ – whether it be performance anxiety or just their own general mental health and it’s now got me to a point where I’ve gone and got help to try to figure this out.

“I think if you don’t offload some of that it’s going to catch up to you at some point and, since then, I’ve had many conversations with a lot of people throughout the last four or five years and it’s really nice to know that it’s helped some people open up.”