Chelsea manager Rafael Benítez must avoid farce at Stamford Bridge after Italian soap opera with Inter Milan In the background lurked an omnipotent, trigger-happy owner; for Roman Abramovich, read Massimo Moratti. The Italian owner refused to grant Benítez funds to add to the squad, meaning players like Mario Balotelli were not replaced. Instead, a few returning loan players apart, Benítez was more or less told to make do with what he inherited. He began, portentously enough, with a dour 0-0 draw against Palermo. Posterity has judged Benitez's Inter reign as an almost unadulterated failure. It is not quite as simple as that. A record of 10 wins from 23 domestic and European games is fairly damning, but there were plenty of factors out of his control. It was not his fault, for example, that he was given no money to spend. Nor was it his fault that Inter suffered from a cruelly long series of injuries that prevented him from playing a first-choice back-four all season (not that that stopped Moratti from attempting to blame the injury crisis on Benitez's training methods). Nor was it his fault that after five successive Serie A titles and a Champions League win, Inter had extremely high expectations. But Benítez was culpable on many levels. While he may have turned things round on the pitch given a little time, a little money and a little luck, it was off the pitch that he would irrevocably burn his bridges. After winning the only trophy of his Inter career, beating the Congolese team TP Mazembe to win the Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi, he issued an ill-advised ultimatum to Moratti. Back him wholeheartedly with funds in the January transfer window, or sack him. It was a watershed moment. "Benítez broke something in our environment after what he said at the Club World Cup," captain Javier Zanetti said later. Moratti, meanwhile, was deeply unimpressed with Benitez's grandstanding, and the relationship between the pair was irrevocably derailed. Two days later, Benítez went on Spanish radio to deny reports that he had been dismissed. "I have not been sacked," he said. Many people that read the newspapers have called me up to ask me if I had been dismissed. It's not true. Three days later he was dismissed. Tactically, Benítez was found wanting, too. It is Maicon who still bears the taunts and mental scars from his famous beasting at the hands of Gareth Bale in a Champions League match at White Hart Lane, but the fault arguably lay just as much with Benítez. Despite Bale's threat, clearly demonstrated by his hat-trick in the reverse fixture, Benítez offered Maicon little or no cover, playing the inexperienced Jonathan Biabiaby on the right wing. With Maicon swamped and Biabiaby failing to track back, Inter were ripped apart. The 3-1 scoreline flattered them. After an underwhelming first couple of months, Benítez gained the confidence to tinker with the system, switching from Mourinho's 4-2-3-1 to a narrower, more compact 4-3-1-2. This change failed to bring an upsurge in results, and had the effect of alienating his best player. "I got frustrated under Benítez," Wesley Sneijder said later. He wanted me to play as a striker. Benitez's last league game ended in a catastrophic 3-1 defeat to Lazio. He had been in the job for just six months. Assailed by a combination of circumstances, internal politics and his own loose tongue, Benítez by the end of his reign cut a rather tragic figure. His first priority will be to make sure his Chelsea career does not end in farce.