I will never forget the first time in my playing career I came up against Antonio Conte because it was the night that I ended up in my first big argument with Sir Alex Ferguson and there was only ever going to be one winner in that situation.

For that day you have to go back to September 1996, I was 22 years old, and Juventus, with Conte as their captain, were the best team in the world. The previous May I had been to the Champions League final in Rome as a guest of my boot sponsor, Reebok, where Juventus had beaten Louis Van Gaal’s Ajax team on penalties and it had been an eye-opener for me.

Juventus were the standard that any team with aspirations to win the Champions League had to reach, and we were no different at United. Juventus were different to what I knew. They played a 4-3-3 formation and by the time we went to Turin to play the defending champions in that autumn of 1996, they had...