Barcelona gets a Messi victory

Argentine stars made the difference Wednesday in the European Champions League as teenage sensation Lionel Messi scored twice Wednesday to lead Barcelona to a 3-2 come-from-behind victory over Celtic in Scotland, and Carlos Tevez scored a late goal to earn Manchester United a 1-1 tie at Olympique Lyon of France.

In two other games, world and European champion AC Milan, with the Brazilian duo of Kaka and Pato in the starting lineup, held Arsenal to a 0-0 tie in London, while Fenerbahce used its home-field advantage in Turkey to defeat Sevilla, 3-2.

The closest either team came to scoring in the Arsenal-AC Milan clash was when the Gunners’ Emmanuel Adebayor crashed a header against the Italian crossbar with 15 seconds left to play.

The game in Glasgow was the match of the day, however.

Celtic took the lead on a goal by a player with arguably the strangest name in soccer, Dutch star Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, but Messi quickly tied it up. The Scottish team again went ahead when Barry Robson scored, but Thierry Henry equalized for Barcelona.

Finally, with 11 minutes remaining in a pulsating encounter, Messi grabbed the game-winner that put Barcelona in the driver’s seat heading into the second leg in Spain.

Before the match, Celtic Coach Gordon Strachan said: “We are playing against the potential winners of this competition and we have to remember that. There’s no way we can go and play like headless chickens, although sometimes playing that way can worry the opposition.”

Celtic did more than worry Barcelona, but in the end Messi scored the vital goals that should be enough to put the Spanish team in the quarterfinals.

“They have the best squad in the world and only time will tell if they have the best team in the world,” Strachan said after the game.

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Former Spain and Serbia national team coach Javier Clemente has lashed out at the Iranian soccer federation after officials there rescinded the contract Clemente had signed to become Iran’s coach.

At issue was Clemente’s refusal to live in Iran, but instead to commute there from Spain ahead of national team games. An angry Clemente said Iran had agreed to that before he signed the deal. “I could have done a good job, but if they are incapable of respecting an agreement from the start then it is better not to have gone,” Clemente told the Spanish sports daily AS.

“They wanted to change the conditions of the contract but only in their favor. I could have said after signing that I wanted … the Shah of Persia’s palace, but I didn’t do that. I respected our agreement and they didn’t.

“They have wasted my time and in the end I got bored. I’m not going to coach Iran now.”

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British police have determined that a white powder sent in a package to Chelsea’s Israeli coach, Avram Grant, along with a death threat couched in anti-Semitic terms was harmless.

The package arrived at Chelsea’s training ground in London on Tuesday, but Grant and the team were in Athens for a European Champions League match against Olympiakos. The police investigation is continuing.

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Berti Vogts, the former German international who coached Germany to its 1996 European championship and later coached Scotland, has resigned as Nigeria’s national team coach.

The move came after Nigeria lost to host Ghana in the quarterfinals of this month’s African Nations Cup and after intense media criticism of Vogts and a falling out between the coach and the Nigerian soccer federation.

Lack of support from the federation had “destroyed all trust between the two parties and further cooperation is impossible,” Vogts’ lawyer said in a prepared statement.

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Pia Sundhage, the U.S. women’s national team coach, named a roster of 20 players Wednesday to take part in the 12-team Algarve Cup in Portugal, a tournament that the U.S. won last year, defeating Denmark in the final.

There were no surprises on the roster, which includes 15 players who were at the Women’s World Cup in China last fall. The U.S. will play China, Norway and Italy in the first round of the March 5-12 event.

grahame.jones@latimes.com