Mumbai: Four new venues and a third place playoff match will be introduced in the third Indian Premier League (IPL) which will get underway in Hyderabad on 12 March2010 with a game between IPL Season2 defending champions Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders.

The final of the 45-day Twenty20 cricket league, which proved a huge success in its first two seasons in India and South Africa, would be held on 25 April 2010, IPL chairman Lalit Modi announced after a meeting of its governing council on Tuesday.

IPL3 will have four additional 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 window remains the same, 45 days”, Modi said before adding the governing council also decided to include two more franchisees in IPL4 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 window would remain more or less the same,” Modi said.