Leverkusen takes season's first loss in Bundesliga play

Coach Klaus Augenthaler's first loss with Leverkusen Saturday dropped his side from the top of the Bundesliga table.

Augenthaler won five straight since being hired, saving Leverkusen from relegation and then moving it atop the Bundesliga this season. But that run ended with a deflected 62nd minute shot from Peter Madsen as his club fell 1-0 to Bochum.

"We did not play hard enough and we lost because of a poor first half," said Augenthaler, a member of Germany's 1990 World Cup winners.

Bremen top by thrashing Schalke 4-1, giving it 10 points in four rounds with a 9-2 goal differential on a weekend when the Bundesliga celebrates its 40th birthday.

The main celebration will be held Sunday when Hamburg -- the only team to play the first division every season -- hosts Bayern, which has a record 17 titles.

Stuttgart points even with Bremen and jumped to second, with an impressive 2-0 victory against Kaiserslautern.

Stuttgart's -- still the league's youngest unit -- charged up and down the field as usual with the attack which made them Bundesliga runnerups last season. The club was rewarded with header goals off corners by Cacau in the eighth minute and Zvonimir Saldo six minutes later.

But Stuttgart's defense has been the revelation. It allowed Kaiserslautern only two chances the whole match in front of 34,000 at Gottlieb-Daimler stadium and hasn't yielded a goal in the season's first four rounds.

That scoreless feat has been accomplished by only three other teams in Bundesliga history. All went on to win the league title.

Dortmund 1-0 to FC Cologne, also paving the way for a shake up in the table, with another lackluster performance. The club hasn't won an away match since December.

A 57th minute free kick by captain Dirk Lottner, which rose above the wall and twisted inside the left post, gave Cologne its first win in eight matches, dating back to the second league last season.

Dortmund for the first 15 minutes behind Tomas Rosicky and Marcio Amoroso, then hardly earned a scoring chance afterwards.

"Their victory was justified. After the first 20 minutes, they outworked us," Dortmund coach Matthias Sammer said.

Sammer's have earned a reputation as being lazy, with burly Czech forward Jan Koller the only player who will scrap and work for 90 minutes.

In other matches, Berlin and Frankfurt drew 0-0, Freiburg routed Moenchengladbach 4-1 and 1860 edged Wolfsburg 1-0.

Berlin, regarded as one of the league's top teams, hasn't scored a goal this season and extended its club record drought to 360 minutes against Frankfurt.

Frankfurt picked up a point this season, and is already earmarked as the leading candidate against promotion. But in the battle of the "zero" teams, as the tabloids dubbed it, both played a dreary match made shaky by the players' lack of confidence.