Chelsea advance in Champions League
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-11-03 09:26

Chelsea and Inter Milan qualified for the round of 16 of the Champions League on Tuesday, while AC Milan and Barcelona moved to the brink of joining them.

Arsenal, by contrast, stumbled again with a 1-1 home tie with Panathinaikos and has drawn three games in a row.

Chelsea advanced in Group H with a 1-0 victory at CSKA Moscow. Inter's 0-0 tie with Valencia, the Spanish champions they beat 5-1 two weeks ago, was enough to reach the next phase from Group G.

Chelsea's Damien Duff, center, fights for the ball with CSKA Moscow's Sergey Ignashevich during their UEFA Champions League match in Moscow, Tuesday Nov. 2, 2004. [AP]

Despite the point, Valencia are now five points behind Werder Bremen, which routed Anderlecht 5-1 thanks to a hat trick from Ivan Klasnic.

AC Milan went to Barcelona needing a tie to make sure of reaching the second round in Group F, but went down 2-1 thanks to Ronaldinho's late strike. Now each team has nine points and needs a point from their last two games to reach the second round.

Watched by their Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, Chelsea made it four wins in a row in Moscow. Dutch winger Arjen Robben finished off a slick exchange with Eidur Gudjohnsen and Damien Duff to score the only goal of the game in the 23rd minute.

CSKA's Vagner Love sent a penalty kick over the crossbar.

"We defended like lions to go home with another clean sheet," said Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho, who led FC Porto to the title last season and whose Chelsea team has allowed just one goal in its four Group H games. "It was a high-intensity match with two teams playing at their highest level."

Mourinho has gone 15 Champions League games without losing, while the club he guided to the title last season, Porto, labored to a 0-0 tie at home with Paris Saint Germain. Porto looks like it's going out in the first round.

Arsenal, which now is tied with Chelsea in the English Premier League, got Thierry Henry's 16th-minute penalty kick. But after Panathinaikos' Angelo Basinas missed a second-half penalty kick, Pascal Cygan, playing instead of the ill Sol Campbell, scored an own goal 16 minutes from the end in Group E.

American forward DaMarcus Beasley's goal lifted PSV Eindhoven 1-0 over Norway's Rosenborg to keep the Dutch club atop the group by three points.

Andriy Shevchenko gave AC Milan a 17th-minute lead in Barcelona. Cameroon striker Samuel Eto'o tied it just before half time. Ronaldinho hit the winner with his left foot for runaway Spanish league leader Barcelona with 2 minutes to go.

Barcelona and Milan have nine points each and Shakhtar Donetsk and Celtic three. Celtic scored a 1-0 victory over the Ukrainian leader which had to play for the last 32 minutes with nine men after two ejections. Alan Thompson scored the only goal in the 25th minute after French referee Eric Poulat penalized Shakhtar goalkeeper Jan Lastuvka for holding the ball too long.

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