Inter Milan v Tottenham: Rafael Benítez joins Eric Cantona in football's funny farm

And if you ever needed evidence that the leaving of Liverpool has not yet remotely erased the city from Benitez’s heart and soul, it was all laid bare here in Milan with this extraordinary message in a milk bottle, in which the Inter boss offered both a rousing defence of his reign at Anfield and an attack on Liverpool’s supposed new hero of the hour, managing director Christian Purslow.

We cannot claim that it all came completely unprompted because, twice at the start of a gentle press conference at Inter’s La Pinetina training base when asked about Liverpool’s takeover, Benitez politely batted the ball back, explaining how he really didn’t want to talk about it because he had to “concentrate on this very important game against Tottenham”.

Yes, of course, you do, Rafa. Er, could this half-volley persuade you per chance? So, reminded how he’s being portrayed by the deposed owner Tom Hicks as the calamitous 'spend, spend, spend’ architect of Liverpool’s destruction, Benítez’s curling lip finally betrayed a man who must have been plotting his retaliation ever since seeing Purslow on TV being cheered for his role in the takeover by New England Sports Ventures.

“I prefer not to talk about this,” the old fibber said. “Because I feel really sorry for the fans. I was watching them and was really sad after the [Everton] defeat so I think it is better that I don’t say too much, but we have a saying in Spanish which is 'white liquid in a bottle has to be milk’.”

Silence. Hmm, OK, Rafa. Comically, the official interpreter then had to step in to translate, somewhat haltingly, into Italian, thus removing the initial impact of the pearl. “So I will explain this,” added Benitez apologetically as his audience waited, breath baited further.

“What means this?” he went on. “It means that after 86 points and to finish second in the league, what changed? The Americans, they chose a new managing director [Purslow] and everything changed.

“So, what changed? The managing director is in all the decisions: new lawyer, new chief of press, new manager, nine new players, new medical staff, new fitness coaches – they changed everything.

“At the beginning, they changed the managing director who was talking with some players, and they changed everything that we were doing in the past. So, if you want to ask again what was going on, it’s simple: they changed something and, at the end, they changed everything. So, 'white liquid in a bottle’: milk. You will know who is to blame. 'White liquid in a bottle’. If I see John the milkman in the Wirral, where I was living, with this bottle, I’d say 'It’s milk, sure’.”

With that, as his audience wrestled manfully with his lactose riddle, he was happy to lean back with an air of self-satisfaction that he had got something off his chest and to now take the locals’ earnest questions about 4-2-3-1, Maicon’s lack of form and Eto’o’s greatness.

You could hardly blame him for his rant. The man who achieved the greatest European Cup final comeback triumph in history, reached another Champions League final and won an FA Cup too, has had to suffer all the wild Anfield revisionism from afar and it has got under his skin.

He knows all about it, not presumably because John the Milkman tells him, but because he has been “monitoring carefully” everything that has gone on at the club since he left in the summer. Once Benitez was their Rafatollah; now the Spaniard has to see them cheering a smoothie in a suit.

The other week, Benítez offered a long interview to an Irish newspaper in which he maybe foresaw the backlash to come. In it, he was adamant that he had never lost the Liverpool dressing room and poured scorn on Purslow’s public pronouncement that his exit was “about as clear-cut a case of mutual consent as I have ever been involved in”, suggesting that his hand had been forced by the Anfield hierarchy.

He seemed for all the world like a man who has yet to get his beloved Liverpool out of his system, revealing that his home in the Wirral is “the only one we have” and also tellingly: “Liverpool is my home and I will come back.”

For the moment, he could be forgiven for feeling as if he is being crushed between two heavyweight histories; weighed down by the Liverpool saga on one side and stamped on here by the ghost of Jose Mourinho.

A local reporter loved all the milk stuff, he told me, because they only usually got five minutes of vaguely useable stuff from Rafa, who may speak fine Italian but reveals nothing and can’t hold an audience. Ah, but Jose; it was always a mesmeric half hour! They wail about Mourinho as if they’ve mislaid their youth.

So how can Benítez top the treblemeister? Well, he can’t really. But a bit like Brian Clough did when lecturing the previous Leeds manager Don Revie, he vows to win prizes better, more attractively than he who shall not be named. “The players are happy because we are trying to play more football, more on the floor, the passing is better,” he said recently.

Not yet, it isn’t. Benitez’s Inter, after a mixed start, have still convinced no one, just as Benitez’s mixed Liverpool did not convince everyone either. Early days but at least here, they recognise him as a very fine football coach, not a human wrecking ball. Rafa will soar again; you can raise a pinta to that.