Manchester City's goalless draw with Sporting Lisbon on Wednesday will not go down as one of the great Champions League matches, but then it didn't need to.
While Real Madrid were pulling off a remarkable second-leg comeback against a typically self-destructing Paris Saint-Germain, City could afford to take things easy after thrashing the visitors 5-0 in Lisbon three weeks earlier.
City put in a decent showing, never really under threat but never exerting themselves to the point of desperately trying to score. All the usual suspects played well, as did 19-year-old Champions League debutant CJ Egan-Riley at right-back, but it was hard to learn much from what was essentially a dead rubber.
