The district collector had granted three IPL matches to the city on April 7th, 11th, and 14th on condition that there would be no scantily dressed cheer leaders and no liquor would be served inside the stadium during the matches.

The state government today imposed the ban on cheer girls and liquor during IPL matches, besides banning fireworks and loud music after 10 PM (IST).

RCA secretary Sanjay Dixit confirmed receiving the letter from the collector.

“He has granted permission on the condition that there will be no cheer girls and no liquor would be served inside the stadium. He has also instructed that DJ or fire crackers would not be allowed after 10 pm,” said Dixit.

The group of cheergirls has already reached Jaipur and had performed in a city hotel.

The moral brigade has long been gunning for banning the Cheer leaders and liquor because according to them it was not in accord with the Indian culture.

The Union Sports Minister MS Gill had openly criticised the IPL for indecent dances of the scantily dressed cheer girls and also serving liquor inside the stadium.

“There is nothing wrong with Yuvraj’s performance,” IPL commissioner and chairman Lalit Modi said, debunking reports about Yuvraj’s wilful underperformance on account of his purported difference with co-owner Ness Wadia and captain Kumar Sangakkara.

“We are monitoring performance of every player on regular basis,” Modi added.

Yuvraj and his Kings XI Punjab franchise co-owner Preity Zinta had also dismissed media reports that the star batsman was deliberately underperforming in Indian Premier League after being stripped of captaincy as completely baseless.

A section of the media had also reported that Yuvraj had desired to leave Kings XI Punjab before the IPL 3 and the team management had made a complaint to the BCCI on this.

But the BCCI denied having received any such complaint. “There is no truth in such claims that a complaint was made to BCCI regarding Yuvraj,” BCCI spokesman Rajiv Shukla said.

Last month, the Australian players were caught in a security furor after a threat from a militant group, linked to al-Qaeda, raised the prospect of mass withdrawals.

But the threat was not credible, according to the Australian government, and the arrival of the last four Australians proves the rich show will go on in all but the most extreme circumstances, reports The Age.

Still, some Australian players already in India have reported concerns about safety arrangements to their union at home. One team bus was stranded on a bridge for 90 minutes, while other concerns have been raised about team hotels.

“I don’t know if the security issue really ever goes away,” the paper quoted Australian Cricketers Association boss Paul Marsh, as saying.

“There are concerns no matter where we tour. We are now just playing a monitoring role on behalf of the players, which we’ll continue to the do for the rest of the tournament,” he said.

But, the main show will always continue to be in India. “All teams will play 4-5 matches a year at overseas venues… These matches will be beyond the main annual season,” IPL commissioner Lalit Modi said.

“IPL will always remain in India… The main season will always be in India, but we will hold exhibition matches abroad and from there additional revenue can be generated,” he said.

“We are talking about generating additional revenue from holding exhibition matches abroad in a kind of international leagues… these could take place at various venues in different countries after the main season ,” Modi said.

The continuity through a long cricketing season would certainly help advertisers plan their exposure, he said, adding that global exposure would be an added attraction.

“What we are looking at is that in the eight months from June to January, there could be certain weekends when certain teams will have some free time and they can play some matches abroad… From 2011 onwards, all the teams, this way, will get to play 4-5 matches a year at overseas venues… May be one match can be held in Middle East, one in South Africa and one in Americas and like that,” Modi said.

“We will make a proper schedule for the entire season of matches to be held abroad… A season can be of eight months… That way we will be able to take the IPL Carnival or IPL Festival to other countries,” Modi said.

Elaborating on revenue generation potential of these overseas matches, Modi said that advertisers may not be interested in one-off matches, but they would be very much interested in sponsoring the entire season, through which they can get exposure to various markets across the world.

“Additional revenue can be generated by playing internationally and hosting exhibition matches abroad… Besides, we are already looking at generating revenues from overseas advertisers and broadcasters… There is also internet and mobile (platform) where we are broadcasting the matches, thus giving advertisers a wide array of platforms.”

Asked if the IPL would be able to cross the billion dollar figure in terms of revenue generation this season, Modi replied in the affirmative. In the previous season, a total revenue of close to $450 million was generated, he added.

Modi, however, asserted that the main IPL would always take place in India. “I’ve been often misquoted as saying that IPL is going abroad, but it is not.”

The matches of IPL’s third season are currently being played in India. Only the second season was shifted to South Africa due to security concerns in the wake of elections.

“I am raring to go. It’s a great opportunity to get back into Twenty20 mode. We have a World Cup coming up in West Indies and I am the skipper of the Twenty20 squad. So it is great chance to work on the mental aspect of the game and prepare for the event,” Collingwood told reporters here.

Notwithstanding the three-game loss on the trot, Collingwood feels Delhi Daredevils still have a chance to make it to the semifinals and said he will contribute his bit to boost the middle-order if he plays on Monday.

“I wouldn’t say we are in a bad position. Yes, we have lost three games but there is lot of confidence in the team after the last win. A few more wins and we will peak at the right time. I feel we still have a great chance to make it to the semis,” Collingwood said.

“I don’t think we have any mental block playing here. IPL involves travelling and playing in different pitches and its all about adjusting to the different conditions. You never know how will a wicket going to play.

“I have not played a single match yet. Hopefully I will play tomorrow and will try to boost the middle over. I have done something similar in Bangladesh playing for England and so my role will be similar. I am looking forward to playing in the tournament,” he added.

Collingwood said Kolkata Knight Riders have some dangerous players and it would be a tough match on Monday.

“They have some dangerous players. (Chris) Gayle is their number one batsman and its is important to get him early. They also have a match winner in Shane Bond. It is a difficult match.

“But we also have some good players in (Virender) Sehwag, (David) Warner, (Dinesh) Karthik. Everybody is in good spirit and we look to carry on the good momentum,” he said.

Asked if more foreign players should be allowed to include in the playing eleven, Collingwood said it will mean the local players will miss out.

“If more foreign players are allowed to participate in the playing XI, it will make the game more exciting but then the local players will miss out. IPL gives a chance to the Indian players to experience the pressure situation and evolve as a player,” he said.

Delhi Daredevils have lost captain Gautam Gambhir to a hamstring injury, Rajasthan Royals’ South African import Graeme Smith has flown back with a “double fracture” in his right-hand finger and India skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni can’t play for Chennai Super Kings for at least the next 10 days due to an elbow problem.

English all-rounder Dimitri Mascarenhas, another Rajasthan Royals player, hurt his ankle and he too would miss the event from now on and how many more end up with niggles and injuries will be known only after the league draws to a close next month.

Players getting injured during a tournament is nothing new or unheard of but would be adding to the anxiety of their respective boards is the fact that the breakdowns are happening just a couple of months before the Twenty20 World Championship in the West Indies.

At a time when cricketers don’t really have an off season to look forward to, sustaining peak fitness is a huge challenge and only a few like Australian captain Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke have been able to turn their back on the lure of IPL’s fast cash and keep themselves fresh for international commitments.

The temptation of millions for just six weeks of cricket is too big to ignore for most of the players but they end up risking their fitness in a hectic tournament.

A case in point is Australian pacer Brett Lee, who came to play for Kings XI Punjab despite a recently-repaired elbow but had to ultimately fly back home for further treatment after failing to recover in time.

Last year’s Twenty20 World Championships missed the likes of Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen after they got injured during the IPL and the frequency at which players are heading to hospitals in this edition again raises a question about how many of the top names would be fit for the showpiece event this year.

It’s a debate that has forever raged in international football where players have been accused of risking their all for cash-rich clubs and not being at their best for national duty.

Going by the look of things, cricket too seems set for such a debate.

John Buchanan has failed to lift the Kolkata Knight Riders from the IPL. There were reports that he has taken up a consultancy with England.

John Buchanan, who heads the franchise’s cricket operations, boasts of a long coaching staff that includes chief coach Matthew Mott, trainer Adrian Le Roux, physio Andrew Leipus, assistant coach Michael Buchanan, assistant coach Brad Murphy, wicket-keeping coach Wade Seccombe, fielding coach John Deeble, bowling coach Andy Bichel and cricket manager Joydeep Mukherjee.

The World Cup winning Australian coach also has his son Michael Buchanan for a post which is termed as ’strength trainer’.

Defending champions India were eliminated from the Twenty20 World Cup by England on Sunday. Afterwards captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni said fatigue was a factor while Kirsten went a step further saying players had carried injuries into the tournament.

“A lot of those niggles were picked up during the IPL,” Kirsten told reporters at the team hotel. “We lose contact with our players during the IPL because they are connected and responsible to their franchises and the players take a lot of pride representing their franchises as well.

“The bottom line was the amount of cricket that was being played and the amount of niggles that came into this tournament. Maybe we need to consider pulling players out, but whether that is possible I don’t know.”

The international schedule around next year’s IPL is likely to be even tighter with the International Cricket Council staging another Twenty20 World Cup in the West Indies in April, the period when the IPL has been staged in the past two years.

India lost their explosive opening batsman Virender Sehwag without playing a match because of a shoulder injury while Zaheer Khan missed the start of the tournament after sustaining a shoulder injury in the IPL.

If fast bowler Ishant Sharma is rested from the IPL he could lose a large portion of his $900,000 contract. Dhoni, himself, is on $1.35 million and opener Gautam Gambhir is on $750,000.

Kirsten also said because of the amount of cricket being played teams now needed to use bigger squads.

The outrage will be a bit tempered, however, because of the fact that the Ashes are round the corner. Some might even explain away the loss by suggesting that Twenty20 is ‘fun cricket’, as Younis Khan so curiously suggested after Pakistan lost to England.

The fact is, though, that Australia never looked the part in this World Cup and were rightly shown the door. Their six-wicket defeat to Sri Lanka here at Trent Bridge on Monday saw them crashing out of the tournament and it means they haven’t qualified for the knockout rounds of a major event for the first time since the 1992 World Cup co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand.

Rarely has an Australian side looked so confused and rusty. Rarely has an Australian skipper looked so hapless and beaten as Ricky Ponting was during the post-match media briefing.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what went wrong, really. That’s five Twenty20 internationals we have lost on the trot. That’s a bit of a worrying trend for our team and our group. We have stumbled when the big moments have come along,” he said, looking crestfallen.

Australia have looked vulnerable in Twenty20 cricket for some time now and their bowling has been a major source of worry.

It didn’t escape Ponting’s attention. “We gave away too many extras and committed too many mistakes, bowling wides and conceding extras. You can’t do that against top sides. While I have no doubt about the health of our Test cricket, our Twenty20 form and One-day form hasn’t been good for some time now,” he said.

Perhaps not playing in the IPL wasn’t such a smart idea. If you look at the performance of most teams, barring the surprise Super 8 qualifiers in the Netherlands and Ireland, one can see that the players who have done well in the IPL have sizzled in England too.

To name just a few, Dilshan, Sangakkara, Muttiah Muralitharan, Rohit Sharma, Chris Gayle, Pragyan Ojha and Kevin Pietersen have all made a mark.

All of them had played some T20 games and when it came to the subtle improvisations with the bat and variations with the ball, they were battle-ready. The Aussies, though, fumbled when they attempted the same.

Ojha, in fact had credited his success against Bangladesh to the IPL and Dhoni too extolled the virtues of the IPL as he felt the younger players were exposed to pressure situations and knew how to deal with them. England star Kevin Pietersen labelled it “the best academy in the world”.

Among current players, Australia only had Andrew Symonds, David Hussey, David Warner and Brett Lee who played in the IPL.

The Aussies sent Symonds back due to an ‘alcohol-related issue’ and Lee played very few IPL matches as he had to play in the series against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi.

Pakistan too didn’t have any player participating in the IPL and they are struggling to stay afloat.

So did the Aussies struggle because the players didn’t play in the IPL? Ponting was defiant in denial. “I don’t think so.

We had a few players playing there, but we could not have played in the IPL as we had international cricket going on at that time. Besides, I don’t think we lacked in our preparation. We had two big wins in the warm-ups against Bangladesh and New Zealand.

“Only me and Michael Hussey were contracted to play the IPL and we opted out. Even if we had played, we would have been able to play just three games. I don’t see how it would have helped,” the Aussie captain explained.

Sangakkara, though, believed that the IPL was a great finishing school. “We had 13 Sri Lankans playing in the IPL and the experience some of our younger players gained was great.”

“We have never propagated that we should be part of the Future Tours Programme (FTP) for the IPL or the Champions League because I think there is a natural window for these two events,” he said.

“We never asked for one and we are never going to ask for one,” he was quoted as saying by the ‘Guardian’ today.

Modi was recently reported by the IPL website as claiming that the Champions League had been slotted into the FTP but ICC Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat’s contradicted him.

“There was a miscommunication as far as I’m concerned,” Modi said about the report.

Modi said he was confident that various members of the ICC would sit together to find space for the events like the IPL and Champions League.

“Going forward we will be working along with members and work out a solution in the new FTP which is in discussion,” he said.

Asked if more such Twenty20 leagues may prove to be an overkill of the format, Modi disagreed and said instead it would bring more crowds to the other two forms of the game – ODIs and Tests.

“We just finished the review of IPL in South Africa and have found that 70 per cent of the people who watched IPL this year (in South Africa) never watched any form of cricket before. That’s an astonishing figure. For a tournament like the IPL to be able to garner new audiences is critical for the growth of cricket,” Modi said.

“If we are able to get people to Twenty20 we are only enlarging the pie: you will see them go and watch one-day and Test cricket.”

Modi said he could explore foreign venues for IPL games in future as well, and did not rule out England as one of the potential venues.

“Currently we haven’t examined the UK yet. We just had a tremendous success in our first season outside of India,” he said.

“This actually now opens a whole new area for us and we are now going to be examining games overseas. Where and when will be played is still matter to be debated and studied. The cricketing calendar in England is full so that would have to be taken into account.”