A jubilant Pep Guardiola felt Manchester City needed to be "perfect" to extend their winning run after reiterating his belief that Napoli are among the best sides in European football, having ground out a 2-1 victory on Tuesday night.
City stormed out of the traps with goals from Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus inside the opening 13 minutes but Napoli wasted a gilt-edged chance to halve the deficit when Dries Mertens' penalty was saved by Ederson just before half-time.
The Brazilian goalkeeper was a towering presence in the City goal and the only time his net was breached was through Amadou Diawara's 73rd-minute spot-kick.
City, though, never really looked in danger of failing to secure their third win in Group F, though Guardiola was quick to praise the opposition.
"Napoli's an exceptional team," he said. "One of the best teams I have ever faced in my career, no doubts about that, maybe the best.
"It was perfect, if we don't play good we cannot beat that team, it's impossible.''
"The situation is go to the next one and try to win the game. Three games, nine points is good but it's not already done. We cannot relax. We need one more victory to qualify but we want to try to finish first.''
City maintain their 100 percent start in this season's Champions League and defender John Stones was pleased by several aspects of their performance.
"We've put ourselves in a good position, a lot of games to play still. I say it all the time but we've got to keep going game by game," he told BT Sport 3.
"I think tonight was a great test to see where we were really at after a good run of hard games. We knew it was going to be a tough test.
"We wanted to play our game and I think some of the football out from the back right the way through to the guys up top was, at times, great to watch for me personally.
"We're a bit upset to concede the goal that we did, I thought it was a bit soft but overall: a great team performance. Every game is a hard game. We want to keep improving, keep scoring goals, keeping clean sheets and hopefully we can progress in the group.''
Fellow defender Kyle Walker was quick to hail the performance of Ederson after City sealed a 10th consecutive win in all competitions.
The former Tottenham full-back said: "We always knew they were going to come at us in the second half. I thought the lads showed good character out there. Ederson's kept us in it and we need to say a big thanks to him.''
Source: espn.co.uk