Another Manchester City match, another performance heavy on possession and light on attacking quality in the final third.
For all Pep Guardiola's talk before the match about how Club Brugge's selection had surprised the team, the hosts started with the sort of nonchalant authority that made them appear set for another cricket score. Having scored six here against Leipzig and five in Belgium, a new group high looked comfortably on the cards.
Except for a long time all the pretty play to get to the box never materialised into putting the ball in the net.
Scoring goals remains the hardest thing to do in football; it is why Erling Haaland and Harry Kane command such extraordinary fees - high enough for City to decide this summer that they would have another go at trying to win every competition going without any centre-forwards in their squad.
Guardiola's side were three games away from a Quadruple playing that way last season, and have shown already in this campaign that they remain irresistible when on song.
But there have also been enough red flags to indicate that not all is as well as can be in attack and that scoring a handful every other game doesn't actually get you bonus points for when you fail to find the net once every three games. Against Brugge, a stodgy first half was improved by a sharper second.
When City score so little despite having so much possession, the obvious thing missing is a striker - that world-class No.9 that would convert all the half-chances and turn these kinds of matches into processions.
Such a focal point, clamoured for on social media whenever the team struggles, is also a fantasy. City wouldn't pay the asking prices for Kane or Haaland (or Cristiano Ronaldo, although that wasn't just down to money), and it would have put huge pressure on an untested striker to try to fill Sergio Aguero's boots while also being asked to fit into the successful pressing machine in full flow.
City's boom-and-bust nature of their matches this season has seen them fairly likened to the 2019/20 season when they finished as top scorers but did not win the league, but there are also comparisons to last year when they looked horribly short creatively until January when everything clicked and they stormed to the title with a record-breaking run of results.
Whether that is sustainable for another campaign when teams should not be being caught cold by the idea of a false nine remains to be seen, but Guardiola has been forced to carry out the experiment because of the failure to sign a striker in summer.
If the manager is right that every defeat or poor performance should not be put down to the club's lack of transfer market activity, there are also many times where a No.9 would make life a lot easier for the team.
And for all the grey involves, if you don't want people longing for a striker sometimes it is often as black-and-white as Guardiola put it to his players during their Centurions season: you have to score the ******* goals, guys.
