12 March 2004	Friday	20 Muharram 1425

LONDON, March 11: European champions AC Milan briefly flirted with elimination before crushing Sparta Prague 4-1 on Wednesday to reach the Champions League quarterfinals.

They were joined in the last eight by Real Madrid, who beat Bayern Munich 1-0 with a goal from Zinedine Zidane for a 2-1 aggregate win. Their success was marred by a flare-up between the players at the end of injury time but no-one was booked.

Also through from the first knockout round are Arsenal, who beat 10-man Celta Vigo 2-0 with two first half goals by Thierry Henry for a 5-2 aggregate victory.

His two goals set a new European scoring record by a French player with 39 goals - one more than the all-time record previously held by Jean-Pierre Papin. AS Monaco played most of their match against 10 men, beating Lokomotiv Moscow 1-0 to squeeze through on the away goals rule after losing the first leg 2-1.

Croatian Dado Prso, who scored four when Monaco beat Deportivo Coruna 8-3 in November, got Monaco's winner after 60 minutes to make amends for a first-half penalty miss. But Lokomotiv had to play for 68 minutes one man down after their skipper Dmitry Loskov was sent off in the 22nd minute after picking up two yellow cards inside 60 seconds.

The first was for a foul on Fernando Morientes and the second after showing dissent for being booked in the first place. Wednesday's winning quartet will go into Friday's quarterfinal draw with Porto, Chelsea, Olympique Lyon and Deportivo Coruna who all qualified on Tuesday.

The draw is open, with no seeding and no restrictions on teams from the same country playing each other. Milan are in the draw but were briefly heading towards the exit when Sparta substitute Tomas Jun scored two minutes after coming on to put the Czechs level at 1-1 in the match - and ahead on away goals after the 0-0 first-leg draw two weeks ago.

Milan then endured a nervous seven minutes before Andriy Shevchenko put them 2-1 up with a well taken header. Thirteen minutes later he made it 3-1 and Gennaro Gattuso completed the scoring five minutes from time. Filippo Inzaghi had scored Milan's opener on the stroke of halftime.

Their old rivals Real Madrid also made it through to the last eight with a slender 1-0 win over Bayern, who won the European Cup for the fourth time in 2001 but have now failed to make the last eight for the second successive season.

The only goal at the Bernabeu arrived on 32 minutes when Zidane fired home unopposed after Michel Salgado made the most of a hesitant Bayern defence to head a deflected David Beckham pass across goal and ensure the Spanish champions earned a 2-1 aggregate victory.

The match ended with the players pushing and shoving each other but Zidane was not too bothered and walked off with a Bayern shirt draped in triumph across his shoulders.

Results

Arsenal 2 Celta Vigo 0

(Arsenal win 5-2 on aggregate)

AC Milan 4 Sparta Prague 1

(AC Milan win 4-1 on aggregate)

Monaco 1 Lokomotiv Moscow 0

(aggregate 2-2; Monaco win on away goals rule)

Real Madrid 1 Bayern Munich 0

(Real Madrid win 2-1 on aggregate). -Reuters