Knock-out phase beckons Arsenal and Chelsea

Arsenal can confirm its recent resurgence by reaching the Champions League's last-16 with victory at home to Olympique Marseille on Tuesday.

After a wretched start to the season in which it won just three of its opening eight games and was humiliated 8-2 by Manchester United, Arsenal has turned its campaign around with a run of eight wins in nine matches. The most recent of those victories was a stunning 5-3 success at Chelsea on Saturday that thrust the Gunners back into the race for a top-four place and shattered doubts about their supposed vulnerability.

Robin van Persie was Chelsea's conqueror, netting a slickly taken hat-trick, but it is thanks to an injury-time Aaron Ramsey goal at Marseille in its last European outing that Arsenal finds itself on the brink of the last 16. His strike at Stade Velodrome allowed his side to leapfrog Olympique Marseille at the Group ‘F' summit and three more points against Didier Deschamps' team on Tuesday will put Arsenal in the knock-out phase for the 12th season in a row.

“What has changed is that we got half of the team in on August 31 (transfer deadline day) and we had to qualify for the Champions League,” explained Wenger. Like Arsenal, Olympique Marseille struggled at the start of the season, but appears to have turned a corner in recent weeks. Saturday's 3-2 victory at promoted Dijon was the club's third victory in succession in all competitions and lifted Olympique Marseille up to ninth in the Ligue 1 table.

Attacking players

Olympique Marseille's attacking players have been liberated by a new 4-4-2 formation introduced in a 2-0 win at home to Ajaccio on Oct. 22, but Deschamps is likely to revert to a more cautious set-up for the trip to the Emirates.

In the other Group ‘F' fixture, Borussia Dortmund hosts Olympiakos, needing a victory to keep its qualification hopes flickering. After an unscheduled 2-1 loss at the Greek side in the previous match, the German champion is just one defeat away from elimination.

Chelsea will bid to turn the page on a damaging week with a win at Genk in Group ‘E,' which should be enough to see the 2008 finalists into the next round. However, should it win in Belgium and Valencia fails to beat Bayer Leverkusen in the other group game, Chelsea would go through.

The schedule:

Group ‘E': Valencia (Esp) vs. Bayer Leverkusen (Ger); Genk (Bel) vs. Chelsea (Eng). Group ‘F': Arsenal (Eng) vs. Marseille (Fra); Borussia Dortmund (Ger) vs. Olympiakos (Gre). Group ‘G': Zenit Saint Petersburg (Rus) vs. Shakhtar Donetsk (Ukr); APOEL Nicosia (Cyp) vs. FC Porto (Por). Group ‘H': BATE Borisov (Blr) vs. AC Milan (Ita); Viktoria Plzen (Cze) vs. Barcelona (Esp).