“Drobo, Drobo,” the khal – sorry, the call – went from the stands. Hamburg fans took care to acknowledge a former favourite, goalkeeper Jaroslav Drobny, on his return to the Volksparkstadion in the green and white of Werder Bremen. Before crossing the Nord-Derby divide this summer, the 37-year-old had spent the previous six years with die Rothosen, mostly left to his own devices by an array of bumbling defenders, forced to pick hundreds of balls out of his net with the dignified desolation of a man scouring piles of discarded betting slips for a forgotten winner.

On Saturday, though, Drobny was the enemy, a traitor for moving 128km down the A1 to the Weserstadion, and the “Drobo” chants were designed to hurt not please. Every nervous touch of the Czech stopper was accompanied by the gleeful, sarcastic repetition of his nickname by the home supporters. Markus Gisdol’s players knowingly targeted their former team-mate – “probably the worst footballing keeper of the league,” according to Welt – whenever he tried to kick the ball. The strategy paid off, instantly.

One of Drobny’s miscued clearances went straight into touch and indirectly led to Hamburg’s early opener, a header from Michael Gregoritsch from the ensuing throw-in in the third minute. Since silly mistakes at the back soon became the main theme of the afternoon, as Fin Bartels (14th minute), Gregoritsch (28th minute) and Serge Gnabry (45th minute) traded goals that owed a lot to defenders absent-mindedly stepping out of the way or being precisely in the wrong place at the right time.

Drobny, a “constant source of disquiet,” as the Hamburg tabloid MoPo put it, never quite recovered from his early blunder, even if he didn’t follow up with another decisive mishap. The Werder coach Alexander Nouri’s explanation for preferring the veteran to the equally accident-prone Felix Wiedwald for the must-win game against their fellow strugglers – Hamburg and Werder were 18th and 16th in the table, respectively, before their 105th meeting – sounded as unconvincing as his team’s defensive performance had looked on the whole. “We chose Jaro to provide stability with his presence, personality and experience,” Nouri said. “The way he saved the shot from [Filip] Kostic – we all thought the ball was in but he got there.”

Drobny did make a couple of decent saves to ultimately rescue a point for the visitors but in the end the 2-2 draw only exposed the glaring deficiencies of both teams. The first half, especially, had brought one of those immensely shambolic, wonderfully diverting matches that the Bundesliga used to produce every single week before clever gegenpressing became the leitmotiv in the current decade. It’s no coincidence that the demise of the big two up north started when their natural rivals and many other, lesser-endowed clubs developed collective playing systems based on a strong collective ethos. Hamburg’s and Werder’s enduring individualism – the idea that a couple of big-name heroes can lift you above the mundane – amounts to a multi-season-ticket for relegation strife. They haven’t had a functioning system or team for years now, only a series of under-qualified coaches and over-extended star players who are revered as saviours.

The 68th minute substitution of Gnabry, Werder’s best player of the season and most important goalscorer (five goals in as many away games), was emblematic of the cult of personality that has substituted good sense: Gnabry’s replacement Claudio Pizarro, the 38-year-old demigod, on the pitch by popular demand, was not quite up to speed and unable to swing the tide Bremen’s way. Werder can now add a “Torwartproblem” (Weser-Kurier) to their long list of worries, as neither Drobny nor Wiedwald inspire any real confidence. Thirty-one goals conceded in 12 games are reminiscent of the stinky, defensively incontinent Thomas Schaaf days, early improvements after Viktor Skripnik’s dismissal back in September have vanished amid the realisation that the men at Nouri’s disposal lack the necessary quality to achieve anything near a clean sheet.

“You can’t win any games defending the way we do,” the captain Clemens Fritz said. “We served up the two goals on a silver platter for them.” Hamburg were just as accommodating at the other side of the pitch. “We were a little careless,” HSV coach Markus Gisdol said generously, in an effort to protect “the tender shoots” of progress he had witnessed.

Going forward, Hamburg did indeed almost look like a normal Bundesliga side, thanks to the energetic Gregoritsch, who nearly scored a hat-trick that would have made the best answer to a quiz question for years to come. Following his header and successful left-footed shot to make it 2-1, the Austrian had a chance to score a third goal – without a boot on. He was carrying it in his hand, having lost it in a challenge by Philipp Bargfrede, he was primed for eternity (“I thought: if I score now, I go down to history”) but, alas, the ball never reached him. Shame. (The goal would have stood. Playing on without shoes or shin pads after losing either accidentally is allowed under the latest version of the Laws of the Game).

The result was just about enough to keep Hamburg, bottom of the table with four meagre points, “alive,” as Gregoritsch said. It was greeted by the 55,000 fans in the ground – two hundred Werder ultras had been kept away under the flimsiest of pretences by the Hamburg police – by concerned silence rather than jubilation or anger, however. Whether the self-styled Bundesliga-Dino (dinosaur) can soon return to a more comfortable existence is doubtful, while the situation off the pitch remains as fraught with vagaries as Johan Djourou’s thought-process. Under-fire sporting director Dietmar Beiersdorfer will be allowed to stay in office for a little longer which is another way of saying that the club’s dysfunctional leadership structure, with investor Klaus-Michael Kühne calling the shots over the heads of the board, will persist. Gisdol’s green shoots will do extremely well to grow into anything substantial on such uneven, barren ground.

Results: Freiburg 1-4 Leipzig, Gladbach 1-1 Hoffenheim, Köln 0-0 Augsburg, HSV 2-2 Bremen, Ingolstadt 1-1 Wolfsburg, Frankfurt 2-1 Dortmund,Bayern 2-1 Bayer Leverkusen, Schalke 3-1 Darmstadt, Hertha 2-1 Mainz.

Talking points

• “In Bavaria, we are democrats – so there’s no need for an opposition,” the great Gerhard Polt once observed. The bon mot came to mind as 98.5% of Bayern Munich club members re-elected Uli Hoeness as president on Friday night. A total of 108 no-voters were shouted down as self-important irritants. Polt again: “We in Bavaria are a democracy that forces no one to become a minority. Everybody has the right to avow themselves part of the majority.” Hoeness, 64, had looked apprehensive during his pre-vote address to the 5,000-strong crowd in the Audi Dome, with 2,000 more in an adjacent tent. How many would turn against him after his conviction for tax evasion and jail sentence? He promised to work “seven days a week for Bayern”, admitted a “terrible mistake” and recalled “crying like a puppy dog” in his cell. But soon enough, the old bravado reappeared. Hoeness, officially not involved in the day-to-day running of the football club, a plc controlled by Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, left no one in doubt that his opinion will be heard, inside and outside Säbener Strasse.

Uli Hoeness speaks during the Bayern general meeting. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images

League leaders RB Leipzig, who temporarily stretched the gap to six points with a 4-1 win at SC Freiburg that evening, were gently needled (“they were watching on the sofa while we played Champions League”) and welcomed as a “serious rival”, while an overhaul of the academy system was named a priority. In addition, Hoeness appeared markedly less convinced by the idea of Philipp Lahm as a future sporting director and vowed to ensure that Bayern would meet their “social responsibility”. It’ll be interesting to see how that can be squared with another winter trip to Qatar in January, among other things.

On the pitch, it was hard to discern any positive effect from the comeback of “Mr Bayern”. Carlo Ancelotti’s team were rather laboured and ultimately lucky to win a tightly contested game against Bayer Leverkusen 2-1 on Saturday evening, courtesy of a Mats Hummel header from an improvised corner (“I was supposed to take it short but no one came,” Joshua Kimmich said) and Javi Martínez saving a goal-bound Kevin Volland header with his right arm, without anyone relevant noticing. “If it’s a penalty, it’s penalty,” Leverkusen sporting director Rudi Völler grumbled. “Football isn’t that complicated sometimes.”

• Thomas Tuchel might not agree but his mood was darker still. The BVB coach blamed “a (complete) technical, tactical and mental deficit” for Borussia’s 2-1 defeat at Eintracht Frankfurt. “Today’s performance, from the first to the last minute, didn’t deserve a single point,” the 43-year-old added. The harshness of the manager’s criticism betrayed plenty of tension behind the scenes as his young team struggle to play to the exacting standards of a manager remarkably low on patience.

• While Frankfurt and Hertha continue to outperform relative to their squad strength, Schalke 04 are slowly beginning to look like the decent, well put-together team that many had expected to see under new leaders Markus Weinzierl and Christian Heidel this season. The Royal Blues showed resilience to bounce back from going a goal down early at home to Darmstadt, the 3-1 result prolonged a run of 12 games without defeat in all competitions and seven wins in a row. Next up for the eighth-placed side is a trip to Leipzig – for a clash between tradition and artifice.