Manchester City saw off Sevilla 3-1 on Wednesday, but - to continue a theme of recent weeks - it wasn't all plain sailing.
City's final Champions League group game was a dead rubber - City secured top spot in the standings a week earlier, while the Spanish side were already assured of a third-place finish. That allowed Pep Guardiola to make seven changes to the side that beat Leicester at the weekend.
At half-time City trailed 0-1, resulting in some familiar grumblings both online and in the stands; for the fourth time in the past month, City were struggling to create chances and play with their usual fluidity without Erling Haaland on the pitch.
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Haaland missed out with a foot injury, something Guardiola hopes will have sorted itself out by the time City take on Fulham in the Premier League on Saturday. Julian Alvarez started up front in his absence, flanked by Jack Grealish and Riyad Mahrez and supported by a midfield trio of Ilkay Gundogan, Phil Foden and Cole Palmer.
With Sergio Gomez at left-back and 17-year-old Rico Lewis on the right, it was a very attacking line-up - but as was the case during large chunks of recent games against Brighton, Borussia Dortmund and Leicester, City struggled to break their opponents down or create meaningful openings.
Some have attributed those struggles to Haaland's absence (although he did play and score two against Brighton). The argument stands up better for the latter of those two games - in the second half in Dortmund and the full 90 minutes at Leicester.
They struggled in the opening 45 minutes against Sevilla, but their second-half improvement showed why there's no need to worry about City being over-reliant on Haaland.
Those games were tough not because City didn't have Haaland, but because of how the opposition set up. Leicester and Sevilla set up with compact, deep-lying defences, the kind that afford little-to-no space between the lines. Those matches turned into tests of City's patience - thrown the kitchen sink at it and you risk losing the ball and leaving yourself open to the counter-attack.
In both instances City passed, even if neither made for thrilling spectacles. There is an argument that Haaland gives an additional option when coming up against negative set-ups, but there's no guarantee that his presence alone would have created chances. The opening 45 minutes in Dortmund before the striker was withdrawn proved that.
In-fact, the kind of fight that Brighton put up against City in the Blues' 3-1 win - man-to-man marking and aggressive pressing - is when City need Haaland most. His speed and directness allowed City to put him in one-on-one battles with defenders, which he duly won before racing in on goal.
City are coming up against five-man defences with increasing frequency, and it's up to Guardiola and his players to find solutions. On Wednesday Pep got Foden and Palmer - playing as number eights - to push higher and wider up the pitch, which helped to spread out the Sevilla defence and create gaps to exploit.
City will no-doubt encounter that kind of game more and more as the season progresses, especially when Haaland is fit and available. While City's passing and sharpness has looked a little off in recent games, the reality is that even a team packed with the best talents in the world will sometimes look pedestrian when given no space to play in.
Until players start dropping stinkers or City lose multiple games, there is little to worry about.
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