Mumbai Indians’ (MI) captain Rohit Sharma, who was recently excluded from the Indian team for the Australia tour, is nearing match-fitness through continuous training if reports are to be believed.

Rohit suffered a hamstring strain in MI’s match against Kings XI Punjab on October 18 and has since missed two matches, in which Kieron Pollard has captained the team. Sources in the know of developments confirmed that the MI skipper will not be taking the field against Royal Challengers Bangalore at the Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium on Wednesday.

However, he has been working on his game and hamstring muscle to ensure that he is back in the team soon.

"He has been training regularly. The day after the KXIP game was a rest day so there was anyway no training. But whenever the MI unit has trained, he has been there and while he slowly started with working on his leg, he has been hitting the nets now. In fact, before the last game, he also took throwdowns at the ground. He is clearly making an honest effort to regain full match fitness," the source told ANI.

AUS v IND 2020-21: Rohit Sharma advised 2-3 weeks rest by specialist doctors, says report

While MI is sitting pretty at the top of the points table with 14 points from 11 games, Rohit’s omission from all the three squads came as a big shock and another issue is that the Indian selectors named squads for the Australia series which starts on November 27 with the first ODI at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Even though as per reports national team physio Nitin Patel had informed the selection committee -- led by Sunil Joshi -- that Rohit would need 2-3 weeks to get fit, the selectors decided to omit him from the team and added that his injury status would be monitored by the BCCI medical team.

This has surprised some as Rohit has already completed 10 of the 21 days that the medical team expects the limited-overs deputy to take to recover from the hamstring injury.

(ANI reports)