It took a lot longer than most would have guessed, but sometimes it's hard to tell precisely what you have been missing until you find it.
So it proved on Saturday night in Alexandria: as Odion Ighalo ran on to Ola Aina's backheel, opened up his body, and shot just inside the far post, it became clear. As David Tomlinson once said, it was simply necessary to "do it with a flair".
Until that moment, the mechanics of the performance had been largely fine. This, after all, was a team almost arrived at by elimination, rather than selection.