Man City push their luck again with Coventry Redux display at the Dragao

A 2-0 win away from home to start your Champions League campaign against seasoned European opposition, maintaining a 100 per cent start to the season.

Given Porto keeper Diogo Costa also made eight saves, you’d have to think all was going pretty well for Manchester City and their new manager Enzo Maresca.

And yet…

This was an often frustrating and – worse – familiar evening for City, whose carelessness and sloppiness threatened to get them into unnecessary trouble on more than one occasion.

Having taken the lead through Erling Haaland, they almost immediately switched off, dropped off and dozed off. Coming so soon after the fate-temptingly similar Saturday afternoon against Coventry, it has to be slightly concerning.

This is a distinctly non-vintage Porto side, and they offered little beyond niggle and antagonism until encouraged to do so.

City spent the first half gradually easing through the gears to end it in clear ascendancy and probably a touch miffed that their own profligacy and Costa’s brilliance had kept the scores level.

Half time featured a tunnel-based fracas before Erling Haaland nodded home an almost slow-motion opening goal early in the second half.

It should have rubberstamped City’s latent superiority and set them up to ease over the finish line. A needlessly fraught 45 minutes would pass before Haaland’s second made the game safe, with Porto given far more encouragement than they needed or deserved to believe that a route back into the game might be available to them.

There’s a need to be measured here. City have four wins from four in the Premier League and Champions League under a new manager tasked with replacing a legend. It’s hardly a catastrophe. But there’s definitely also something missing.

The glass-half-full interpretation is that City have bought themselves time to locate that missing ingredient without losing any early ground on anyone anywhere.

The more pessimistic view is to point out that City have had a gentle start to the season and only in dispatching a Crystal Palace side in the midst of a Fear For Them episode of their own have Maresca’s men truly convinced.

Right now it all just feels a bit Liverpool from this time last year. A bit unsustainable. A bit too fate-temptingly high-wire. These are wins that feel like they’re masking more than they’re revealing about this side.

Obviously, it helps when you have Haaland. He should probably have done better with at least one of the two presentable chances he had in the first half, especially one that he sent back across goal towards the waiting Costa when a good half-goal-sized target nearer to him was begging to be hit.

But it was his two clinical finishes that kept the disappointment around the general performance vague rather than laser-like.

He is still one man, though. And not even he can save City from themselves every week.

There is no panic. There is no crisis. City have ample time and scope for significant improvement and you can only beat what’s in front of you. But that really is just as well for a team that pushed their luck for a second game running in a manner that meatier opponents would surely have punished.