He went on to play for Aldershot, St Albans and Chesham before moving back into the League with Oldham and then Colchester. He then made the jump to the Premiership on transfer deadline day at the end of August.
Palace manager Iain Dowie and brother Bob, the club's director of football, have both worked with the speedy striker before and believe they can continue to see improvement from him.
Andrews made his first Premiership appearance as a substitute in last weekend's goalless draw with Blackburn and said: "Hopefully that will be the start of something.
"I have got a lot of friends who I grew up with when I was playing at Watford, that are now playing in the Premiership and I wonder what happened.
"It would be good to play against Rio but it would be funny.
"I used to see a lot of him when I was at Oldham and lived in Manchester. We used to go out together a lot and I saw him a few weeks ago.
"We have never played in the same team apart from when we went down the park, but I have played against him and I never got the better of him."
And for Andrews, the sight of Ferdinand at Old Trafford might help to settle his nerves. He's used to playing in front of a few thousand fans, not taking centre stage at the biggest ground in the country and so is just hoping he gets off the bench.
Andrews said: "I went up to Palace's Carling Cup game against United last month and the stadium felt empty when there were 48,000 people there.
"It will be full up on Saturday and if I get on I will look around for a few seconds. It will be the biggest crowd that I've played in front of in my whole career."
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