As the popular saying goes, five weeks is a short time in football. It's even shorter when you have to cram 12 matches into that timeframe.
With such a deluge of activity, it can be easy to miss the certain trends, or to chalk them up to other factors—physical, mostly.
So when, in the aftermath of Manchester City's elimination from the FA Cup at the semi-final stage, Riyad Mahrez found himself consigned to bench duty for the final two matches of the domestic calendar, it may have simply seemed a quirk of rotation, a necessity in the hard slog of a condensed Project Restart.