Three takeaways from the Bundesliga Saturday

Long gone are the days when Bayern Munich and Werder Bremen met relatively eye-to-eye. Coach Robin Dutt's troops arrived in the Bavarian capital with their main aim being to avoid a thrashing. They failed abjectly.

Bremen had zero shots on goal to Bayern's 19 and only 22 percent of possession in going down to a 6-0 defeat. The only reason the score line wasn't crasser was that Munich, ahead 4-0 at half-time, took their foot off the gas after the break. Werder didn't manage a single shot on goal all game. Zero. Nil. Zippo. Over a full 90 minutes.

"We don't need to try to put a positive spin on this," Dutt said after the debacle. "We played really badly, and that has nothing to do with Bayern Munich."

Bremen have been rebuilding for the past two seasons, but at some point every construction project needs to show signs of being finished some day. Otherwise, people get hot under the collar and start looking for someone to blame. Long-time supervisory board chairman Willi Lemke found that out earlier this week - he'll be replaced by former player Marco Bode next season.

That move coincided with the announcement that cash-strapped Bremen would be willing to engage in some moderate deficit spending to try to revive the club's sporting fortunes, which are as moribund as the Greek housing market. But with Bremen dead last in the table and with a horrible goal difference, Dutt may not survive until the winter break to spend any of that hypothetical cash.

Bremen, who have flirted with relegation the past two seasons, will have to work hard just to survive in the first division. At present this team looks extremely unlikely to ever get back to the level of their glory years.

Leverkusen continue to confound

Stuttgart coach Armin Veh's Saturday started even worse than Dutt's as his charges put on a lifeless display and fell behind by three goals in the first half. Fortunately, for him his opponents were Leverkusen, who showed again why they are the Bundesliga's biggest conundrum, surrendering a trio of goals and barely scraping out a 3-3 draw.

Raising hopes of greatness, only to dash them, is seemingly part of the team's muscle memory, and new coach Roger Schmidt hasn't been able to drive out this tendency. If this match had been a prizefight, the referee would have put an end to it after 45 minutes. Leverkusen made their hosts look so bad that home fans turned their backs on the team at the restart. Normally, three guaranteed points, you'd think.

"Apparently there's no such thing as a normal game for us," Leverkusen coach Schmidt after watching his team blow a three-goal lead.

You might argue that Leverkusen felt too secure after the break and failed to deliver the final knock-out blow. You could say that the Pharmaceuticals panicked unnecessarily after Stuttgart got one back in minute 57. But there's really no explanation for a team of Leverkusen's wealth and squad quality, with pretensions toward silverware, coughing up points as unnecessarily as this.

It's becoming a recurrent trend. At this point last season Leverkusen were level with Dortmund on points only a single point behind Bayern. At the end of the campaign, they barely scraped into fourth. In the off-season, they added stand-outs Hakan Calhanoglu and Karim Bellarabi, but it seems that Leverkusen still lack a winner's genes.

Happy sprays are here again

Minute 18 of Bayern Munich versus Werder Bremen will go down in history as the moment when the free-kick spray football fans got to know and love during the 2014 World Cup made its debut in the German first division. Fans reportedly cheered when the referee got out his can of disappearing foam.

What's the big deal, you may ask. The spray proved an elegantly simple solution to the otherwise Gordian problem of keeping the wall where it should be. Leagues across the globe adopted it. So why did it take the Bundesliga until round eight?

A variety of reasons were cited, including concerns as to whether the foam really does disappear, whether it's visible in snow and whether it's bad for the sensitive environments in endangered biotopes like the Allianz Arena and Signal Iduna Park. None of the justifications was less than surreal.

The truth is that German football is just inherently conservative. The mere mention of phrases like "goal-line technology" is enough to make German Football Association functionaries start flapping their wings like spooked chickens. But there's no reason for them to quiver. The Bundesliga survived the first use of the fearsome foam without any noticeable damage.