KEEP IT SIMPLE and back your ability. That may sound a truism, but Malachy Loye says it is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given him. And where did he get this pearl of wisdom? From Peter Carlstein, last winter, after Loye went to Perth to play grade cricket. He came back a different man and a different batsman. On July 22 he became the first Englishman to pass 1000 Championship runs for the summer. A winter tour place now beckons.

Quite simply, Loye says, Carlstein helped transform his game. Last year was the most depressing of his career – not so much because of indifferent form but because of severe back problems. His back seized up in the middle of a Championship match against Essex in mid-July, and he did not play again in 1997. `My back was in spasm for most of the year – at times I was literally on all fours,' recalls Loye. `I had to have six separate injections into specific joints, but they did bring relief.'

Once his back had finally settled down, Loye set off for Australia to play for North Perth. `I'd heard so much about the standard of grade cricket there, and I knew I had technical faults and that I had to change my attitude to the game and toughen up. The club were more professional than most counties.' By chance, the club's president, Max Goldenberg, with whom Loye was billeted, knew Carlstein well, and soon it became part of the deal that he would coach Loye.

Carlstein, a 59-year-old South African who played eight Tests between 1957 and 1963, has his own definitive coaching methods based around positive psychology. Both Hollioake brothers credit him as their mentor. `He's a real hard guy,' admits Loye. `He makes you look like a idiot, but only to make you want to prove him wrong. You either like him or you don't. He sent me straight home the first time I went to him – for talking negatively about myself. I'd driven 12 miles to get to him and he just said Don't ever mention the word can't. From then on, I never spoke badly of myself.'

Carlstein then got to work on Loye's technical faults. `I wasn't watching the ball, just the area of the ball. I wasn't going forward or back, and I was getting too far across. I'd started doing that last summer when Northants made me open, and I'd been getting out lbw a lot. Now Peter was getting me to bat with the minimal amount of movement, keeping my head still and watching the ball very closely***.'

Peter Carlstein made Loye play in the nets using a half-bat with the edges sawn off

Carlstein made Loye play in the nets using a half-bat with the edges swan off, rather than a normal bat. `It meant I really had to get to the pitch of the ball. But the next one might be round my ears and I had to get right back to it. It was out of a bowling machine, so it was quick too. You were found out technically – and that is the key as you have to be honest with yourself. But Peter made it fun. Every professional needs that kind of guidance, and I did at the time.'

The two still keep in touch. `I phone him up occasionally. You forget some things he told you, but hearing his voice jogs the memory. He follows my progress, and the Hollioakes', on the internet.'

 IF LOYE, 25, keeps playing as well as he has been this season, that progress will lead to an England cap, according to John Emburey, now the Northants coach: `Mal's knocking on the door of the Test side, is a potential candidate for Australia and a dead cert for the A tour,' he says. `The change in him has all been up top. Last year, he was too positive – hooking too frequently and being too loose. He was confused and mixed, but all that's been thrashed out. He's now tighter in defence, and more patient. Technically, he can get runs on wickets that are doing a bit, and he uses his feet well to spin.'

 Loye thinks his success has also derived from batting at No. 3 for the first time. `The club told me in the winter that they wanted me to open again, but I said no. I open in one-dayers but in first-class games I'm much happier at three. I always batted there in my youth.'

Now Northants would not dream of asking their most prolific runmaker to move from first drop. After his record-breaking 322 against Glamorgan, the highest score in the county's history, he had added three more Championship centuries by the end of July, not to mention 500 AXA League runs – more than anyone else in the competition. His father, Pat, saw every one of the 534 balls his son faced in his triple-century, while his mother Anne followed the innings on Ceefax. `Usually, I only go to watch the Sunday games, but I could actually have gone to the Glamorgan one,' she confessed. `But I was scared that as soon as I walked into the ground, Mal would get out. So I sat almost paralysed watching the screen. Mal's deserved his success this year because he's worked so hard. I'm proud of how determined and disciplined he's been.'

Such discipline includes swimming almost every day to help the full rehabilitation of his back. `There's only one public pool in the whole county where you can do laps,' bemoans Loye. `In Perth, you could hardly go a mile without coming across an Olympic-sized pool. I'd do a mile a day there.'

 Mal Loye's cricketing ambition is simply to improve every day. `The rest is in other people's hands,' he philosophises, fresh from a burst of reading Awake the Giant Within, a motivational book by Anthony Robins which was given to him by his best friend Darren Sutton. `It takes about half-an-hour to get through a page,' he quips, `but I'd take it with me to a desert island. It's by an American who's a typical high-flying over-the-top type. But it's been useful.'

Whichever tour he goes on this winter, this Northampton-born strokeplaying batsman with Celtic antecedents who loves Irish folk music and Ballygowan mineral water will look to be more positive than when he toured South Africa with England`A' four years ago. `The management told me to cut out a lot of the shots I was playing, and I lost a bit of my flair there, becoming too negative. I'd play it my way on another tour.'

Full face: Loye is now tighter in defence and more patient, John Emburey says

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