CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
Catalan giants Barcelona were the first team to progress to the Champions League knockout stages after Tuesday’s group matches with a 1-1 draw with Swiss side Basel.
PHOTO: AP
However, it was a nightmare evening for English Premier League giants Chelsea and Liverpool as they both missed out on qualifying for the eliminatory stages — for the moment at least — as they went down to defeat to AS Roma and a draw with Atletico Madrid respectively.
Chelsea lost 3-1 to out-of-form Italian side AS Roma — who had lost their last four Serie A matches — while Liverpool drew 1-1 with Atletico Madrid with a fortunate injury-time penalty by Steven Gerrard grabbing them a point.
PHOTO: EPA
Chelsea’s former coach Jose Mourinho has made barely more friends with his outspoken style since he took over at Inter Milan and the knives will be out for him even more in Italy after the Italian champions managed to grab a fortunate 3-3 away draw with surprise Cypriot package Anorthosis Famagusta in Nicosia.
Meanwhile the Portuguese-born handler’s former bitter rivals when he was Porto coach, Sporting Lisbon, secured their place in the knockout stages with a 1-0 win at home to Ukrainian outfit Shakhtar Donetsk.
PHOTO: AFP
Both French sides lived to fight another day with much-needed wins as Brazilian Wendel scored Bordeaux’s second to give them a 2-1 away win over Romanian side Cluj, while Marseille got their first points on the board with a 3-0 win at home to PSV Eindhoven — Seneglese international striker Mamadou Niang scoring two of them.
PHOTO: AFP
Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola was happy despite his side’s flawless Champions League start and their run of 11 successive victories in all competitions being terminated by plucky Swiss side Basel that had gone down to a 5-0 home defeat a fortnight ago.
“The result is fine by me because we have qualified for the last 16 and that was our target,” said Guardiola, who replaced Dutch soccer great Franck Rijkaard in the summer.
However, qualification did come at a cost for the Catalan giants as Spanish Euro 2008 winning midfielder Andres Iniesta was ruled out for up to six weeks with a leg injury.
For Basel coach Christian Gross — who didn’t have the opportunity this time to just take the metro to the game as he had infamously done when he enjoyed a brief period as Spurs coach in England — it was a merited result.
“Apart from the draw, which is a spectacular result for us, the most important thing was that we were compact as a team tonight,” he said.
While Chelsea let slip a chance to progress their defeat was a welcome relief for embattled AS Roma coach Luciano Spalletti, who despite two successive runners-up spots in Serie A was looking a mite in trouble to keep his job.
Showing a certain willingness to change things, Spalletti transformed his usual 4-2-3-1 formation to a standard 4-4-2, something he will stick with for the time being.
“For now yes, we’ll continue along this path. To change things you need the players,” he said before explaining how he had changed his team’s losing mentality.
“The psychological work was in staying united and compact and with a push from our fans who let it be known that they were right behind us,” Spaletti said. “It’s clear that you have to have confrontation with some players and then players such as [Daniele] De Rossi, [Simone] Perrotta and [Matteo] Brighi make the difference on the pitch in terms of spirit.”
Atletico Madrid must have believed that they had qualified for the last 16 until Gerrard, as ever Liverpool’s savior, stepped in to score the injury-time penalty — and it will be little consolation to Atletico that it extended the hosts record of never winning a home Champions League tie against Spanish teams.
Gerrard for his part believed that it was deserved — as indeed he would.
“I went down first, so yes it was a penalty,” Gerrard said. “I can understand why Atletico were livid, as we would have been if it had been against us. But that is how it goes.” Standings after Tuesday’s matches:
• Group A
Team P GD PTS
1 Chelsea 4 3 7
2 Roma 4 2 6
3 Bordeaux 4 -4 6
4 CFR Cluj-Napoca 4 -1 4
• Group B
Team P GD PTS
1 Inter Milan 4 3 8
2 Anorthosis Famagusta 4 1 5
3 Panathinaikos 4 -1 4
4 Werder Bremen 4 -3 3
• Group C
Team P GD PTS
1 Barcelona 4 8 10
2 Sporting Lisbon 4 2 9
3 Shakhtar Donetsk 4 -2 3
4 Basel 4 -8 1
• Group D
Team P GD PTS
1 Atletico Madrid 4 4 8
2 Liverpool 4 3 8
3 Marseille 4 -1 3
4 PSV Eindhoven 4 -6 3
• Group E
Team P GD PTS
1 Man United 3 6 7
2 Villarreal 3 4 7
3 Celtic 3 -4 1
4 Aalborg BK 3 -6 1
• Group F
Team P GD PTS
1 Bayern Munich 3 4 7
2 Lyon 3 2 5
3 Fiorentina 3 -3 2
4 Steaua Bucharest 3 -3 1
• Group G
Team P GD PTS
1 Arsenal 3 7 7
2 Dynamo Kiev 3 1 5
3 FC Porto 3 -3 3
4 Fenerbahce 3 -5 1
• Group H
Team P GD PTS
1 Juventus 3 2 7
2 Real Madrid 3 2 6
3 BATE Borisov 3 -2 2
4 Zenit St Petersburg 3 -2 1
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