However, while the poisonous bile is no longer lapping at the back of my throat, I feel my point is still valid, so I'm going to write this anyway. It's a common failing of football journalism that every result is magnified into a defining theme - we lost on Tuesday, the club is collapsing, the manager needs to go, all the players are awful; we won yesterday, the club is an unstoppable force, the manager is a genius, all the players are twinkle-toed miracle-workers. It's lazy.
So, in the knowledge that it's easy to be critical after a defeat, I'm going to be critical in the wake of an excellent victory against the Italian champions. More than that, I'm going to be critical of both the manager and of the man who opened the scoring. Those of you who came here for a hagiography, look away now.
I should warn you that I'm going to do another thing that is quite rare among football writers - I'm going to admit I was wrong. A few months ago I wrote a column in these pages about Dirk Kuyt, saying that he is anything but a winger, and that Benitez' tendency to play him on the wing is baffling and counterproductive. I agree with that still. What I no longer believe is that he is a player of sufficient quality, or potential quality, to play for Liverpool.
The fact that he scored the opener is essentially irrelevant. The fact that it's his second in two games is less so; the other was against Barnsley, for God's sake, and anyway, we all know the end result of that cataclysm of a game. Even if his goal against Inter had been a gem of rare quality, hammered in from thirty yards after beating five men, we've seen enough of him to know that it would be a statistical fluke. He simply doesn't have that sort of thing in his locker.
I feel bad saying this, really, because in one sense I really like him as a player. He works astonishingly hard, and his reading of the game is good; he always shows for a pass and no-one tracks back more than he does. He is doing his very best to make the most of his limitations.
Unfortunately for him, his limitations are serious and legion. He has no pace; he has no tricks, and can only beat players by knocking it past them and sprinting, which is difficult since - as mentioned - he has no pace; his first touch is wooden in a way not seen at Anfield since the glory days of Emile Heskey; his vision isn't bad, but his ability to thread a pass never matches it; and he suffers from a nasty case of spoon-foot when it comes to finishing. He's not even good in the air. It baffles me, every time I see him, to think that he cost the same as Dimitar Berbatov, a silk-shoed demigod in gloves.
All this is well and good. He can't help his abilities, and it is harsh to blame him for them; he doesn't pick himself every week, the manager does. I personally don't think he's good enough to make the squad, but an argument could be made that he is a useful squad player.
The problem is that he is not being used as a squad player. He starts almost every game, and has the absolute cast-iron faith of the manager.
As if that weren't bad enough, though, he isn't even being played in his best position. Last night - and on several other occasions, as I have mentioned before - he was parked out on the wing, shivering away from heat of the action. If Dirk Kuyt is to be of any use at all, he needs to be squaring up to centrebacks, harrying and hassling them, making the most of his workrate and muscle, winning headers and scrapping for second balls. Out on the wing he is barely better than useless - he will lose the ball far more often than keep it, he can't cross, and his aforementioned pace-and-tricks vacuum is not going to be much use when it comes to skinning a fullback on the way to the byline.
But what really baffled me last night was that, when the time came to make changes, Jermaine Pennant was brought on for, not Kuyt, but Ryan Babel. Babel had been one of our better players, looking dangerous cutting in from the wing and making even the mighty Javier Zanetti wary about getting forward. Kuyt had been Kuyt. Fair enough play your donkey of a striker as a donkeyish striker, Geoff Horsfield made a career out of it; but donkeyish wingers aren't so popular. This is the most baffling of all Benitez' blind spots.
As I said at the start of this column, for most of the second half I had been mentally writing this column. Brought off Babel and left Pennant on; left Crouch on the bench too long; failed to capitalise on a numerical advantage. In the event, of course, a Pennant cross drifted long and Kuyt, controlling well, volleyed it home. It took a significant deflection, but nonetheless it was a good goal.
My concern is, though, that this will somehow blind people to his inadequacies. He scored; he works hard; he seems like a nice guy. He's still not good enough. It will take more than one goal to change that fact, no matter how important it was.
Read Tom's original Wing and a Prayer article