Man City have no chance of winning the Premier League if they remain dangerously reliant on Erling Haaland - but can anyone else step up and carry the burden?

Guardiola's diagnosis of the game was that City had not played badly and simply failed to take their chances: "It was just the finishing. Put the ball in the net. We made a more than good game, we were impressive. We played against a very good team. Sixteen shots [it was actually 18] not bad, in general a hard match, little details. The spirit in the side was really, really good. We (only) missed the last action to shoot better, to cross better."

Villa boss Emery, meanwhile, said his team "needed everything to stop him" when asked how they had nullified Haaland. The coach took a physical approach, adding more height in midfield with Amadou Onana alongside Boubacar Kamara while encouraging his centre-backs Ezri Konza and Pau Torres to double up on the Norwegian, who had just four touches in the hosts' box. 

It's an approach many managers have taken before, only for City's other stars to capitalise on the extra space. But that did not happen on Sunday.

Half of City's 18 attempts on goal were blocked by Villa's stubborn defence. Of the nine attempts that made it towards goal, Haaland had three of them, getting all of them on target.

Josko Gvardiol and Tijjani Reijnders both missed the target twice while Matheus Nunes also had a stray shot, and the only other player to actually test Martinez in addition to Haaland was Savinho. Bernardo Silva and Oscar Bobb had zero attempts and so too did Jeremy Doku, who got more than half an hour from the bench.

So if Guardiola felt the only problem was his team not putting the ball in the net, then only Haaland and Savinho were to blame. That seems unfair, and instead the coach needs to ensure that other players are also taking on the burden of scoring.

The trend of leaving it to Haaland did not begin at Villa Park. When Bernardo scored City's second goal against Villarreal in the Champions League on Tuesday, he interrupted a run of eight consecutive goals that had been scored by Haaland. 

The last player other than Haaland to score for City in the league was Burnley's Maxime Esteve one month ago. That leads us to an awkward fact about City's leading scorer behind Haaland in league games: It's Esteve, who scored two own goals when City blitzed the Clarets 5-1. 

While Haaland has a chart-topping 11 goals in the Premier League, only four of his team-mates have managed to score at all. Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki, Reijnders and Nunes are the lucky ones to have found the net while neither of the team's two main wide forwards, Savinho and Doku, have hit the mark. 

Foden and Doku, meanwhile, are the only players aside from Haaland to have scored in City's three Champions League fixtures to date.

Haaland outscoring his team-mates to a large degree is not a new phenomenon. In his first season at City, he scored a record-breaking 36 Premier League goals and a frankly ridiculous 52 in all competitions. But despite that being his most brutal campaign to date, he was not doing it all alone. In fact, City won the treble because all the other big hitters also had rip-roaring campaigns. 

Six other players scored at least five goals in the league, with Foden notching 11 and Julian Alvarez nine. Ilkay Gundogan got eight and Kevin De Bruyne seven, as well as a bucket load of assists. Haaland drew blanks in the FA and Champions League finals but City still took home the trophies thanks to Gundogan and Rodri scoring at Wembley and the Ataturk Stadium, respectively.

When City won a fourth consecutive title the following season, Haaland's team-mates further reduced the burden on him. His 28 goals were still enough to land him a second Golden Boot, but Foden stepped up with 19 strikes, Alvarez got 11 and even Rodri, ostensibly a holding midfielder, got eight. Opponents knew that if Haaland didn't get them, then someone else would.

That is no longer the case. In the last two seasons, City have grown increasingly reliant on Haaland and it has not served them well. Their joint-second top scorers last season - when they failed to win a major trophy for the first time in eight years - were Foden and Marmoush, who struck only seven league goals to Haaland's 22. Compare that with Luis Diaz scoring 13 goals and Cody Gakpo 10 for Liverpool, even though Mohamed Salah did the bulk of their goal-getting with 27.

The gap between Haaland and everyone else this season has grown even wider, and City are currently in a worse position than they were at the same stage of the last campaign, which they ended with their fewest points since Guardiola's first season in 2016-17 while losing nine games. 

City only dropped four points in their first nine games of last season, by which point they were top of the table, and were unbeaten. This term they have dropped 11 points and lost three times, one third of their matches. They are fifth in the table, level on points with a Manchester United side whose downfall they have been taking great pleasure in, while they are six behind leaders Arsenal.

Guardiola last week made fun of the English media's propensity to make early conclusions, citing them writing off City's title chances after three games of this season before then declaring Liverpool's title defence to be all but over after the Reds' own poor run. After the Villa defeat, meanwhile, he stressed the point that there will be many more twists and turns to come. 

"From my experience it [the season] is so long. So long. I was worried before the [September] international break when we were 14th in the table and they [Arsenal] were seven or eight points in front. Our job is not to look at the table. If they win all their games and win the Premier League, congratulations to them, that’s all we can do. But I have the feeling the team is alive, the team is good."

City have overhauled bigger deficits than six points before, but if they are to end up reclaiming their crown they will need to find a way to win that doesn't involve Haaland doing all of the heavy lifting. Guardiola once referred to Tottenham as 'The Harry Kane team', provoking an angry reaction from then Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino, but now his side are in danger of being dubbed 'The Erling Haaland team', and unless that changes they will win as many trophies as Tottenham during that period: None.