Marseille beat fellow former European champion Ajax 2-1 Thursday to make itself a favorite to reach the UEFA Cup quarterfinals. Benoit Cheyrou and Mamadou Niang scored for Marseille to give the French club a slim lead ahead of next week's round-of-16 return leg in Amsterdam, although Ajax may be happy with the margin of defeat after it played more than half the game with 10 men. Another former European champion, Hamburg, equalized five minutes into the second half to draw 1-1 with 10-man Galatasaray. Also, Udinese beat defending champion Zenit St. Petersburg 2-0, Manchester City beat Aalborg 2-0, and CSKA Moscow, Werder Bremen and Dynamo Kiev won. Cheyrou put 1993 Champions League winner Marseille ahead 1-0 against Ajax in the 19th with a powerful left-foot shot into the bottom corner from about 25 meters. Naing doubled the advantage in the 33rd with a close-range shot, but Luis Suarez got a goal back for Ajax just three minutes later with a penalty awarded for Vitorino Hilton's foul on Eyong Enoh. Ajax, though, lost Gregory van der Wiel in the 42nd after he got two yellow cards in five minutes, ruling him out of the March 18 return leg. Ajax defender Thomas Vermaelen will also sit out the match after a first-half yellow card. Victory and the suspensions make Marseille a narrow favorite to progress to the quarterfinals, although Ajax's away goal could yet be crucial. The return match is scheduled for March 19, with the draw for the quarterfinals and semifinals the following day at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland. Italy forwards Fabio Quagliarella and Antonio Di Natale scored in the final five minutes to give Udinese a 2-0 win over Zenit and what could be a decisive cushion. Quagliarella redirected an 85th-minute cross by Simone Pepe into an empty net for his fifth goal in this season's competition and Di Natale then converted a penalty kick in the third minute of injury time. The closest Zenit came to scoring was when captain Anatoliy Tymoshchuk hit the crossbar at the start of the second half. Manchester City had looked likely to build a bigger lead to take into its second leg after Felipe Caicedo and Shaun Wright-Phillips struck in the first 30 minutes against Aalborg. Despite dominating the Danish club, the closest it came to getting more goals was when Micah Richards had an offside header blocked on the line and Wright-Phillips shot narrowly wide from just outside the area. Caicedo put City ahead in the eighth minute when he turned defender Michael Jakobsen on the edge of the area and scored with a low shot. Wright-Phillips then doubled the advantage with a curling 20-meter shot into the top corner. Galatasaray, the 2000 UEFA Cup champion, took the lead in Germany in the 33rd when Ayhan Akman hit a low shot in off the post from the edge of the area, but Marcell Jansen volleyed in from close range after Mladen Petric had headed a cross by Jose Pablo Guerrero back across the area. Although the Turkish team had to play the last 37 minutes with 10 men after Emre Asik was sent off for a foul on Petric, it still held out to take a crucial draw and an away goal into next week's second leg. Werder Bremen beat Saint-Etienne 1-0 through a 20th-minute goal by defender Naldo. “It's going to be very tough in the return leg,” Bremen goalkeeper Tim Wiese said. Dynamo Kiev beat fellow Ukrainian team Metalist Kharkov 1-0 through a 54th-minute goal by Ognjen Vukojevic, while Vagner Love scored a 50th-minute penalty to give CSKA Moscow a 1-0 win over Shakhtar Donetsk. Paris Saint-Germain drew 0-0 with visiting Braga in the other of Thursday's games.
