The new manager gave me a name-check in the first sentences he uttered when he called the entire playing staff into the gym to address us. “Good to see you, boys,” he said. “I’m Alex Ferguson and I don’t care who you are, whether you’re a Robson, Whiteside, Strachan or McGrath, I’m the boss.

“There’ll be no favourites. You all start on the same level and if you train well you all have a chance here. Let’s hope we enjoy it.”

Of course I was hungover from Ron Atkinson’s party the night before and it probably wasn’t the wisest move to meet the new man when I looked rough and reeked of beer. In my defence, I was injured and couldn’t train, let alone play. It would be a month before I was fit enough to make my debut for him, by which point he had won one and lost two of his opening four games. I knew that he rated me, though, because he was purring after at last seeing me in full training.

The biggest myth of all is that we never got on and, because I turned down the many newspaper offers to slam him when I left, which Paul McGrath regretfully accepted, there is this feeling that I was gagged. But the truth is we got on fine. Sure, there were run-ins and at times my behaviour and wilfulness infuriated him. More often, though, it exasperated him, which is a different thing. We’re not talking about a catalogue of misdemeanours, just a few incidents when we didn’t see eye to eye over my liking for a night out.

The press like labels and so his “hair-dryer” temper is seen to define him, but that’s only one part of his personality. He’s also warm and witty, a genuinely caring and kind bloke, thoroughly decent and so unlike his public image that I laugh when I see him portrayed as this rage monster.

But I can’t deny that I found it difficult to come to terms with the swift change from the latitude Ron gave us to Alex’s less liberal approach, and I wasn’t alone. Shortly after he arrived, we went on a trip to Bahrain for an exhibition match, which we won 1-0 with me scoring. For some reason we stayed on for a couple of days after the game and one afternoon, when Fergie went out shopping, the entire squad got stuck into a few beers.

As the session unwound, the singsongs and loud banter became so rowdy that it must have caught the boss’s attention on his return in the early evening. He stormed into the bar and told us all to get to his room at once. With 15 of us crowded into his bedroom, he read us the Riot Act for the first time, shouting his head off that we were “a disgrace to the club and yourselves. You’re an absolute irresponsible bloody nightmare”.

When he finished his tirade and we filed out of his room, breaking out into beery giggles as soon as we escaped his gaze, I turned to Robbo and said: “But he didn’t actually say we couldn’t go out, did he?” We sloped off to a bar and then went on to a nightclub a few miles away, thinking that we were safely out of Fergie’s range, but as soon as we ordered a drink in the club I turned round and clocked the chairman, Martin Edwards, with some friends. We knew we’d been busted and that he’d be on the phone to the boss.

Sure enough, 15 minutes later, the manager and his assistant, Archie Knox, careered through the doors as if they were raiding a Wild West saloon, grabbed the pair of us and dragged us out. The boss let us have it. “I’ve only been in the job a couple of weeks,” he bellowed. “I haven’t even signed my contract yet and here we are with my two best players behaving like this. Look at the bloody state of you!”

I apologised immediately and said: “Come on, boss, we’re really sorry. Let’s get a taxi back to the hotel.” That was the red rag that set him off again. “Effin’ taxi?” he cried. “Bollocks! You can walk.” And he marched us the three miles back to the hotel, with me and Robbo swaying from side to side.

The boss can be so intimidating at times that people seem surprised that I didn’t just bend to his will. But I couldn’t simply switch all the characteristics that made me a first-team player at 16 on and off at will. I can be just as stubborn, determined and selfish at times in all aspects of my life. The bottom line is that, at 21, I fundamentally disagreed with his view that drinking was harming my football.

Although Fergie’s quest to change our lifestyles was the most noticeable aspect of his revolution, he also brought a far more meticulous approach to training. His first diagnosis, that we were not fit enough, led to far more running than we had been used to and we did much more work on set-pieces and strategy than had been the norm with Ron.

Archie took a lot of the sessions, but you could tell that everything had been thought out upstairs in the office and planned to an intricate timetable, so that every routine was sharper and more intense. Nothing was ever off the cuff again.

Taunts of ‘Judas’ drove me to rescue a lost cause and kick lumps out of Liverpool

Although my ankle kept swelling up, it was more a constant discomfort than the debilitating condition it later became and twice-daily ultrasound treatment got me fit enough for a place on the bench for our match at Anfield on Easter Monday in 1988.

The oddest thing about that game, my last for United against Liverpool, is that our fans make more of my 39-minute cameo than they do of anything else I did in my career. Supporters still come up to me and say: “Thanks for that day at Anfield.”

A 3-3 draw was hardly important in the scheme of things, but it seems to have struck a chord with the fans as the quintessential Whiteside moment. We were 3-1 down when Fergie [Alex Ferguson] told me to go on and I was not at all happy.

My return to the squad had coincided with the news that I had put in a transfer request and I had heard some of our fans use the words “traitor” and “Judas” about me that afternoon. My bad mood was exacerbated by my loathing of being a substitute and when I belatedly gatecrashed the game I wasn’t going to let anyone stand in the way of me demonstrating what United were going to lose.

Within five minutes of getting on, I had put both of Liverpool’s best performers on the day, Steve McMahon and John Barnes, on the deck. Barnes was the victim of an Alan Shearer-style elbow to the throat when I’d flung out my arms to shield the ball and unintentionally, but highly effectively, poleaxed him with a blow to the Adam’s apple.

The Kop were even more outraged moments later when McMahon tried to exact revenge on me and I hit him with a boot loaded with 13st. I got the yellow card I probably deserved. It wasn’t premeditated, and I’m sure he would deny it, but McMahon was wary of me from then on. From bossing the game and with us down to ten men after Colin Gibson’s 58th-minute sending-off, Liverpool cracked.

When [Bryan] Robson scored our second, I knew we were going to get another. Sure enough, on 77 minutes, I squeaked a pass through their defence that put wee Gordon Strachan clear to equalise.

What I did that day became such a vivid memory for our fans because it was one of those games when humiliation was imminent and I did what the supporters dreamt of doing – kicked lumps out of Liverpool.

© Norman Whiteside 2007. Extracted from Determined: My Autobiography, to be published by Headline on Thursday at £18.99