Four new places announced for IPL III

Four new places and a third place play-off match will be launched in the III Indian Premier League which will get happening in Hyderabad on 12-3-2010 with a game between IPL II 2009 winners Deccan Chargers and the Kolkata Knight Riders.

The final of the 45-day Twenty20 cricket league, which showed a huge success in its first two editions in India and South Africa, would be held on April 25, IPL Chairman Lalit Modi declared after a meeting of its Governing Council at Mumbai.

IPL III will have four supplementary match staging centres - Nagpur, Vishakhapatnam, Ahmedabad and Dharamsala - and will also stage one extra match, the 60th, for the third place play-off, Modi said.

"The playing pane remains the same, 45 days", Modi mentioned, before adding that the Governing Council also decided to include two more franchisees in IPL IV to be held in 2011.

"There would be 94 games in all with each franchisee playing 18, instead of 14 preliminary phase games. But the pane would remain more or less the same," Modi said.