The focus will be on comeback men KL Rahul and Shreyas Iyer when Team India begins their six-day conditioning camp in Alur, near Bangalore, on Thursday.

This will be the Rohit Sharma-led team’s final chance to go to the drawing board and chalk out their strategy ahead of the Asia Cup and the World Cup. India play their first match in the Asia Cup against Pakistan on September 2.

Both Rahul and Iyer are learnt to have still not regained full fitness following right thigh and back surgeries, respectively. While Iyer was declared “fully fit” by chief selector Ajit Agarkar after the selection committee meeting, Rahul was stated to be nursing a niggle.

Rahul has been out of cricket since April while Iyer last played in the final Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in March. Both the players are woefully short of match fitness and the camp will be an opportunity to get them into the right groove.

The selectors agreed with the team management’s opinion that the duo’s presence among the rest of the squad would help them physically and mentally.

“There is a camp in Bangalore. After a long time, we have had the opportunity to get all the players in for some skill-based training. We can rectify our weakness,” Rohit said in New Delhi after the selection meeting.

The Dravid-led coaching staff was given a break for the ongoing T20I series in Ireland and will resume work with this camp. All the players are expected to reach Bangalore by Wednesday evening while those joining from Ireland (Jasprit Bumrah, Prasidh Krishna, Tilak Varma and standby player Sanju Samson) will be present by the weekend.

The stress will be on specific roles for specific players though Rohit has already said that everyone should be ready to bat at any position.

The role of the No.4 batter will have to be sorted out in advance since the lack of a specialist batter in that position had led to India’s loss to New Zealand in the semi-final of the 2019 World Cup.

Iyer has been tried out in that position for the last couple of years but whether he can successfully perform from the first match remains to be seen. Rahul is set to miss the first two matches and is likely to be available from the Super Fours stage.

The BCCI has already chosen 14 net bowlers for the camp. The idea of having a jumbo contingent of net bowlers is to not exhaust the bowling resources and ensure quality sessions for the batters.

India’s bowling has a better look when compared to the batting. The successful return of Bumrah and Krishna has eased a lot of India’s problems though Sitanshu Kotak, the stand-in coach in Ireland, feels they “need more and more game time and match practice.”

The camp will be an ideal opportunity to finetune their control and accuracy.