After serving as the catalyst for KKR’s 2014 IPL title run, Robin Uthappa’s early season struggles typified the Knight Riders’ fortunes. But Thursday’s win over Super Kings showed last year’s magic was still there just waiting to be stirred

Karthik Krishnaswamy in Kolkata30-Apr-2015Earlier that over, Manish Pandey had pulled a long-hop straight into deep midwicket’s hands. Now Robin Uthappa skipped down the track, looking to clip Pawan Negi to long-on. He didn’t quite reach the pitch of the ball. It gripped, turned past the closed face of his bat and clanged in and out of MS Dhoni’s gloves behind the stumps.This was the ninth over of Kolkata Knight Riders’ innings. They were 57 for 2, chasing 166, and their required rate was approaching 10 an over.Uthappa had made 34 and 39 in his last two matches. Knight Riders’ had lost both of them, losing steam after getting off to good starts in chases. Had Dhoni completed the stumping now, Uthappa would have been out for 28.At a similar stage in Chennai Super Kings’ innings, Uthappa had been similarly iron-gloved behind the stumps, failing to catch Dwayne Bravo when he nicked a googly from Brad Hogg. He had also shown lead feet twice in the early overs, diving late and awkwardly to let through five wides and then four runs off Brendon McCullum’s gloves, both off Pat Cummins’ bowling.Uthappa is no keeper. He performs the task eagerly and he presumably works hard on it, but he doesn’t move like someone who has done it all his life. Why would he? It is a difficult job. It is a specialist job. Like Kedar Jadhav and Ambati Rayudu – who wear the big gloves on and off for Delhi Daredevils and Mumbai Indians – Uthappa keeps wicket to give his team the option of lengthening their batting or, occasionally, to fit in an extra bowler.It is an uneasy compromise, and it is likely Knight Riders treat his occasional lapses behind the stumps as a price they are willing to pay because of what he gives them with the bat.Knight Riders won nine straight matches on their way to the 2014 title and most of those wins followed a simple formula: field first, restrict the opposition to 160 or less, and chase it down with minimal fuss. The lack of fuss was largely down to the starts Uthappa gave them. He made ten successive 40-plus scores.After a slow start to the season, Uthappa had fallen just short of 40 in successive games and Knight Riders had fallen just short of chasing down reasonable targets. Now Uthappa had another shot at taking his team home.Given the start Chennai Super Kings made racing to 64 for 2 in five overs, it was quite a feat that Knight Riders restricted them to 165. A spin-friendly pitch played its part, but part of the reason had also been Super Kings’ overly aggressive approach.Suresh Raina yet again showed a tendency to throw his wicket away after an early sequence of dot balls. Brendon McCullum rushed to 32 off 11 before falling lbw to Hogg, trying to heave the spinner’s first ball across the line. Faf du Plessis, who had spanked Piyush Chawla for three gorgeous fours through the off side in the previous over, ran down the pitch and swiped at thin air playing across the line to Hogg’s googly.Knight Riders batsmen had shown the same sort of tendency too. Pandey was out to a soft dismissal. Gautam Gambhir top-edged an attempted leg-side swipe to third man. Immediately after Uthappa’s let-off, Suryakumar Yadav fell exactly like Gambhir.All those batsmen, from both sides, were either batting fluently or new to the crease when they were dismissed. Uthappa, on the other hand, was looking scratchy. He began his innings with a beautifully timed clip off his legs against Mohit Sharma, but since then had quietened, especially against Negi’s darts which were spinning sharply and causing problems.A lot of these problems were down to Uthappa’s tendency to play around his front pad. He has worked hard on this over the last couple of years. He has remodeled his pick-up and backlift to ensure his bat comes down in a far straighter line than it used to, and after every ball he plays a shadow front-foot drive – from that half-forward trigger movement, with his wrist cocking simultaneously to bring his bat up near his right shoulder, to the checked finish with the full face showing.Against the fast bowlers, Uthappa was generally getting it right. Against Negi, who was angling the ball into him with his low, round-arm style, Uthappa’s old instincts were taking over. On a surface with less help for the spinners, he might have got away with it chanceless. Here, he only got away thanks to Dhoni’s hard hands.If Uthappa had been out, it would have been out to a mixture of a good ball and a genuine weakness. He wouldn’t have thrown his wicket away. In Twenty20, the concept of ‘throwing your wicket away’ doesn’t carry the same weight of meaning that it does in the longer formats, but in this game, in this Kolkata Knight Riders chase, Uthappa’s role was to stay in the middle. They had the batting depth to be able to pull it off around him.Therefore, Uthappa didn’t attempt anything outrageous. He continued to flounder against Negi for a while and popped one off the leading edge not too far from short cover while trying to work Negi across the line again, but in between he simply drove down the ground or clipped off his pads, and picked up a couple of smart twos into the deep-set leg-side field.At the other end, Andre Russell gave him the room to play this way, carving Negi for a big six over cover, hoicking Ravindra Jadeja through midwicket and crashing Dwayne Bravo through point.The equation had come down to 63 off 36 when Ashish Nehra came back into the attack. The first ball was nice and full, within Uthappa’s driving arc. Down came that perfectly straight bat and the ball whistled low and flat over the long-on boundary. Nehra shortened his length a touch, Uthappa waited on him and used his pace and left-arm angle to guide him for two fours to the fine third man boundary. In the expanded repertoire of Twenty20, these were old-fashioned percentage shots. Fifteen came off that over and Knight Riders could see the finish line.With Russell doing the heavy lifting at the other end, Uthappa kept playing the percentage shots – even when it came down to six off six balls. He faced three balls in the final over, drove all of them down the ground, and picked up two singles and a double. He had set out to bat just this way, from start to finish.