An elderly gentleman got lost in the bowels of the SGL arena on Saturday. Stewards found him heading down a wrong corridor but then became confused themselves: Otto Rehhagel was at first led to the Augsburg changing room by mistake. The Hertha Berlin coach still managed to meet up with his players in time to change from his blazer into his regulation shell suit and emerged to a media frenzy. It felt as if all the camera crews and photographers wanted to see whether the man could measure up to the myth.

In the run up to the 73-year-old's first game after a 4,165-day absence from the Bundesliga, most of the Berlin press had convinced themselves that the veteran's powers were indeed undiminished. "King Otto teaches Hertha to laugh," wrote Berliner Kurier. "Otto saves Hertha because he's harder," wrote BZ. Bild hailed the "Otto revolution – he changes everything at Hertha" and even taz compared him to the future German president Joachim Gauck: "Rehhagel is the Gauck of the Bundesliga: a beacon of hope for the capital."

His aura survived the first 60 minutes intact but then Augsburg, the bottom team, scored the first goal courtesy of Torsten Oehrl. Oehrl added a quick second before Augsburg finished off the dejected visitors with a third one in stoppage-time by Marcel Ndjeng. It was Augsburg's biggest win in the top flight, enough to lift them out of the relegation places and leap-frog Hertha, who slumped to their worst position this season: 16th. The old dame played with distinctly less heart and composure than in the 1-0 defeat to Dortmund the week before. They looked like a team who didn't know what to do and didn't particularly care, either.

Where was Rehhagel's magic? "Otto doesn't deliver," Frankfurter Allgemeine said, with reference to his namesake, the catalogue sales company. But he did, in a fashion, after the final whistle. The son of a miner and former professional painter took young reporters on a crash course of Rehhagelian dialectic. The thesis: "My team are not Bayern or Barcelona, they can't play like that." The antithesis: "We don't need to discuss quality. I have to make my men strong." And the startling, innovative synthesis: "People need to understand that football is a fight. Relegation battles are battles. This is a ride on the razor's edge, it's three minutes to midnight. The only way to find peace for the soul is to have success in the next game."

Those, or similar, sentences could have been found in any edition of Rehhagel's managerial catalogue over the past 30 years. His haughty, dismissive attitude towards the media hasn't changed. "I'm always sober, I'm anti-alcoholic," he said as he waved away a journalist who'd asked whether he'd found the experience sobering. Then he declared the press conference over – despite being the visiting coach on the podium. On Monday, there was further shock when the former TV reporter Rolf Töpperwien, his most trusted side-kick and yes-man, told 11 Freunde magazine that the two were no longer on speaking terms. Töpperwien's crime had been to reveal Rehhagel's resignation after the 2010 World Cup exit. "[His wife] Beate was furious," Töpperwien recalled from his holiday destination in the Seychelles.

Rehhagel has obviously remained true to himself. To some neutrals, that will come as a relief. Delusions of grandeur and an unbearable tendency to quote German classics notwithstanding, Rehhagel is well liked as a unique, immovable object of Bundesliga history. Germans do love "authenticity", the essentially reactionary concept that some things or people are so big and self-evident that they can get by without ever adapting to the realities of the modern, more complicated world.

Rehhagel is nothing but authentic. He expects the world to adapt to him. "I have a treasure chest of experience, the players are welcome to dive in," he said before the game. He told the Brazilian play-maker Raffael that he should be more like Leo Messi, "a superstar who works for team" and tried to instil some confidence, but the actual work on the training pitch was left to the assistant coaches. Rehhagel has never done more than set a broad tactical frame-work for his sides. He has never believed in practising specific moves or discussing the opposition at great length. Video analysis? Kokolores! (rubbish). His approach is almost exclusively psychological.

Whether that's enough to save a moderately talented but terribly incohesive and ill-disciplined side is doubtful. Rehhagel's substitution of the influential midfielder Peter Niemeyer, the one Hertha player who was trying to stem the Augsburg side, raised a few eyebrows. Andre Mijatovic involuntarily divulged exactly how highly – or lowly – Rehhagel is being rated by the side with an unflattering calculation. "There could be three Rehhagels and one Mourinho on the bench but it's the team who have to play," the captain said with a sigh.

His historical legacy is not really in danger. Whatever happens in the next 11 games, it will be Hertha's relegation. The team were beyond salvation, he will plead, with some justification. But Rehhagel may have underestimated the way things off the pitch have changed since 2000. More in-depth, multi-channel media coverage is threatening to pull back the curtain from the wizard of Ott, as ex-players such as Thomas "Was erlaube" Strunz are revealing that his coaching consisted of nothing apart from endless eight-a-side matches. What's more, even sides with equal or less quality than Hertha no longer exclusively rely on motivational speeches and platitudes of passion in the changing room. They have ideas, tactics, systems and other new-fangled methods that provide a modicum of comfort in the absence of self-belief.

Talking points

• Otto's arrival has at least quelled the fans' unrest, if only momentarily. Not more than 30 Hertha supporters turned up to see the team train a little on Sunday before Rehhagel sent the players home "to relax with their families". Life is less idyllic at Kaiserlautern, alas. Following the Red Devils' 4-0 defeat at Mainz 05, 10 friendly, portly skinheads came to a training session and greeted some reserve players with Hitler salutes. The Israeli striker Itay Shechter was called a "fucking Jew" - a term that German linguistic experts would probably not deem affectionate, not even in deepest Rhineland-Palatinate. Policemen desisted from ejecting the group in order to "de-escalate" which was probably the most worrying aspect of this episode. FCK press officer Christian Gruber asked the authorities to bring the full force of the law to bear against the perpetrators. "Racism and discrimination has no place at Kaiserslautern," said sporting director Stefan Kuntz but the former Germany striker seemed more upset about a Mainz supporter's banner alleging a private indiscretion of coach Marco Kurz. "That's the most disgraceful ('asozial') thing I've ever witnessed in German football," said Kuntz, riding roughshod over 1970s match-fixing and two decades of offensive hair-cuts, "that's really beyond the pale." Mainz general manager Christian Heidel later apologised on behalf of the fans.

• "The problem is that we 're playing horribly bad football," Wolfsburg defender Marco Russ put it succinctly. Sections of the Wolves faithful had greeted their team's latest inept showing, a 2-1 defeat by Hoffenheim, with ironic cheers. According to Russ, the basic hierarchic idea of the more experienced players leading the younger ones doesn't work at the Volkswagen-Arena as "everybody's too busy worrying about themselves." Not the most surprising turn of events after Felix Magath amassed a squad of 40-odd players who can never be sure whether they're regulars, banished to the reserves or transfer-listed at any given moment. Mario Mandzukic, Wolfsburg's most consistent player of the campaign, found himself in the stands this week; in his place, Patrick Helmes scored from the penalty spot. The former Germany international made his first start after being frozen out for no apparent reason by the Bundesliga's very own Dr Mabuse for five months. "I didn't think this would happen two months ago, I've been through so much," he said. "But the team lost so I can't get too happy [about scoring]".

• Signs of a bubble burst were detected in the Borussen Park on Friday night, as the pressure to live up to their own exalted standards seemed to hold back Gladbach in the 1-1 draw with Hamburg. Lucien Favre pointed out a more prosaic reason for the lack of oomph upfront, however: the squad was not able to provide solutions in the the absence of creative midfielder Patrick Hermann (collar bone). "I don't have a Sala or Ilicevic," said the Swiss coach, with a rueful look at the visitors' possibilities.

• Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund made most of the Foals' misstep by chalking up solid home wins against Schalke (2-0) and Hannover (3-1), respectively, on Sunday afternoon. Franck Ribéry, who told Le Parisien that he was "a lucky man", played with fire in his … feet against the Royal Blues, popping everywhere, including in Bayern's own box at one point. Two fine goals went only half-way to underline the Frenchman's utter brilliance in a game where Bayern - the mystifyingly clumsy Mario Gómez aside - played with more verve and urgency than in all previous games of this calendar year combined. Schalke blamed the referee Michael Weiner ("He was as bad on his whistle as we were going forward," said sporting director Horst Heldt, who also admitted his team had contributed to their own down-fall by being too negative and a little sloppy at the back. The must-win for the Reds banished talk of a crisis and was welcome news to Rafael Benítez. The Spaniard, over in Munich as a Eurosport expert, was politely told to stay away from the training ground before the game for fear of sending out the wrong signal but was allowed to have a peek on Monday.

• The "King Klopp" (Bild)-led champions, meanwhile, continued their transformation into Polonia Dortmund, as Polish striker Robert Lewandowski scored two to take his tally to 16 this season. The Black and Yellows did have to sweat a little bit when 96 came back into it with a Ya Konan curler at the end but substitute Ivan Perisic made sure of the seventh win on the trot and kept Borussia unbeaten in 17 matches.

• While it would be cruel to pick on Werder Bremen keeper Tim "Conan" Wiese more than is strictly necessary, one cannot help to note that his pre-match prediction ("we'll win 5-0") back-fired somewhat. Nürnberg defender Philipp Wollscheid admitted that they'd found extra motivation after hearing of Wiese's over-confidence and Alexander Esswein duly slotted home to snatch a vital 1-0 away win for the Franconians. In an effort to second-guess the Nürnberg winger, Wiese had actually made way for the show, too, but let's not kick a man who's down (far too early).

Results: Borussia Mönchengladbach - Hamburger SV 1-1, Wolfsburg - Hoffenheim 1-2, Augsburg - Hertha BSC 3-0, Stuttgart - Freiburg 4-1, Köln - Leverkusen 0-2, Mainz - Kaiserslautern 4-0, Werder Bremen - FC Nürnberg 0-1, Bayern Munich - Schalke 04 2-0, Dortmund - Hannover 3-1.

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