I officially became Arsenal property for £100,000, the club’s first six-figure purchase, on Friday, January 2, 1970, accompanied by a wave of publicity and the inevitable comparisons with George Best at Manchester United. We were both slim, young, dark-haired wingers with an eye for fashion and a talent to entertain and excite crowds.

The difference was that George was a genius, and my genius lay in attracting trouble. Rolf Harris was top of the hit parade with Two Little Boys. Enough said.

I entered through the front door into the famous marble hall at Highbury after signing autographs for a smattering of young boys as the television cameras rolled and a posse of photographers snapped away merrily. It felt crazy.

“Well, I cannae go back to Hibs now,” I thought before taking a deep breath in Bertie Mee’s office and scribbling my name on a rather more significant document than the page of a child’s autograph book. The manager made it clear that he was signing me with the future in mind. I would have to fight for my place and he cautioned that I’d find it very different from Scottish football.

After a swift private signing ceremony, we stepped on to the hallowed turf for the benefit of Fleet Street’s finest and were pictured with the North Bank terraces in the background, me wearing a rather fine, cream-coloured, French-style mac, which I’d bought at Jaeger back home in Princes Street. Within weeks, every young man about town seemed to be wearing that coat or something similar.

The signing was dutifully reported on the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News and one Arsenal director said: “We’ve signed the nearest thing in football to The Beatles.” No pressure, then.

I made my debut against Manchester United at Old Trafford on Saturday, January 10. Best was missing, fined £100 by the FA and starting a 28-day suspension for knocking the ball out of referee Jack Taylor’s hands at the end of a League Cup semi-final against Manchester City.

Georgie Boy’s absence reduced the hype a fraction, to the disappointment of the media, so there was only the one skinny winger with long, dark hair and his shirt flapping defiantly outside his shorts in the spotlight. I walked down the tunnel and up some steps and the atmosphere generated by an attendance of more than 41,000 blew me away.

Bobby Charlton had a quiet match for United, which surprised me because I thought he was a terrific player, and it was a pleasure to be on the same park as him. Charlton had some nice things to say about me in Monday’s papers, however. He was impressed by the way I had the confidence to take on players and beat them and by the fact I wasn’t overawed by the atmosphere.

In 2004, I watched on telly as another 19-year-old forward scored a hat-trick on his first appearance at Old Trafford, where United beat Fenerbahçe 6-2 in the Champions League. I’d like to think Wayne Rooney will enjoy a longer, more productive career than I managed.

I scored in the fourteenth minute. Our goalkeeper, Bob Wilson, banged a clearance downfield, the ball bounced and both I and a United player missed it. I was first to recover and shimmied a couple of times, leaving David Sadler and another defender trailing in my wake. The goalkeeper, Alec Stepney, came out and I just sidefooted the ball low and wide of him.

The instant the ball hit the net, it seemed like the best thing in the world, but that goal became a millstone. After that, I was expected to score every time I pulled on a pair of boots and the expectation weighed me down. © Peter Marinello 2007. Extracted from Fallen Idle: Fighting Back From The Booze, Swindles And Drugs That Ripped My Life Apart, to be published by Headline on March 22 at £12.99. You can order this book at a special offer price of £11.69 from Times BooksFirst by telephoning 0870 160 8080 or going to timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Bestie was good enough to give me some advice

On his arrival in London, Peter Marinello was instantly dubbed the “new George Best”

If I had a pound for very time I’ve been compared with George over the years, I would be an extremely wealthy man.

I admit it was a burden. I always wanted to be Peter Marinello, an entertaining footballer pure and simple, and not labelled the “Second George Best”. Of course, there were similarities — long hair, carrying the ball at speed, taking players on, fashion, wine, women and song to excess. I had to smile when one wag in the London press reckoned I never even became the “First Peter Marinello”.

Life can be cruel at times, as I know to my cost. I heard, too, that George drank because he was shy, although he was supremely confident on the park. That sounds very much like me. Like George, I’ve always stuck away more than my fair share of booze, but it never killed me and I still enjoy a good drink from time to time.

Bestie’s agent, Ken Stanley, approached me and proposed I should write a book and open a string of boutiques with George, but I was quite happy.

George was good enough to give me some advice and a little inkling of what I had let myself in for. “Peter Marinello certainly has my sympathy,” Bestie said in one article. “Soon his head will be humming with advice, invitations, pleas and persuasions. There are times when I feel like hiding behind the nearest wall in search of a little privacy.

“But no, you’ve become public property and everyone, it seems, has the right to take you to task on almost any issue. You’ve a diary that runs out of pages. Correspondents who never seem to run out of abuse and so many thousands of letters that you employ a full-time staff to deal with them. Then you need a person to sift through the filthy letters with all their obscenities, before the young girls dealing with your mail are offended by them. I’m still learning to live with all this. I hope Peter will do the same. The best of luck, mate.”

George was spot-on about the abusive mail, but wrong about needing a censor. Joyce, my wife, willingly opened all my letters, sometimes as many as 400 a week, 80 per cent of them from teenage girls. She told me, sniffily: “Some of them are such drivel.”

The night in Nigeria I scored for first time

When at Hibernian, Peter Marinello went on tour to Africa, losing his virginity and almost his life

It was 1968 — the Swinging Sixties for some — I was 18 and still a “good” Catholic boy, although not for the want of trying, when Hibs were sponsored by a tobacco company to tour Africa after the season ended. So it was that we faced three games in Nigeria and one in Ghana, just at the outbreak of the Biafran War. Very helpful, that.

My delicate state of sexual naivety became known to teammate Jimmy O’Rourke, who took it upon himself to organise a nice surprise — a late eighteenth birthday present, I believe he termed it.

After a night’s cheap beer-drinking in Lagos, we returned to our luxury hotel and I was suddenly shoulder-charged sideways through a door to find a lady of the night on the bed, awaiting company — my company. She was a big, gorgeous girl in her twenties.

How could I resist? Roared on by a crowd of half a dozen teammates, I duly “scored”. The lads stayed in the room the whole time after setting up a semicircle of chairs around the bed. They were shouting things like “go on, my son” and “do the business”.

Later in the tour, our courier — a colossus and the spitting image of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin — took us to an island off Accra in Ghana for the day. We spotted some canoes moored nearby and started messing around with them until the owners, clad only in loincloths and wearing tribal facial tattoos, emerged from a clearing in the jungle. Amused they were not and I thought it was even less funny when I was snatched and frogmarched 200 yards down the beach.

The local fishermen, it seemed, were convinced that we had damaged their boats and they indicated that, unless Hibernian Football Club were prepared to foot the bill for repairs, they could kiss good-bye to Peter Marinello. “Bloody hell,” I thought. “These guys are serious.”

I had been restrained, both my hands firmly tied behind my back. Quite what my fate would have been I shudder to think and it took the team 40 minutes of haggling until they came up with the readies and my ordeal was over. Thanks a bundle, lads.