Gary Mackay: Italians can mould Aaron Hickey into a top defender after transfer from Hearts

Hearts' Aaron Hickey heads off to Bologna.

Playing and training amongst top professionals in Serie A will make Aaron Hickey a better defender because the Italians are masters at it. Nobody is able to defend the way they can and they employ every trick in the book to do so.

Hickey is in the very early stages of his development at 18 and there is no doubt he will benefit in that environment. He progressed a lot at Hearts but Italy is an entirely different proposition.

One of the major issues he will need to get used to is how the Italians play defensively, and the lengths they will go to in order to keep that ball out of their goal.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a striker, a midfielder or a defender in Italy, they all defend when their team doesn’t have the ball. They will do anything to keep the opposition out.

I can remember playing in a European Youth Championship for Scotland against Italy in Monte Carlo. If they fouled you, they lifted you up but they would be nipping your arms while doing so.

That was totally alien to all of us at the time so you need to be prepared for that kind of thing. There will be a lot of differences on the field of play that Hickey will need to deal with, but good luck to the lad.

He strikes me as the sort who does want to learn and he is clearly not frightened of change. He had already been at Hearts, then moved to Celtic and back to Hearts again. Those switches will stand him in good stead up to a point.

I look back at people like John Collins and Paul Lambert, who took big steps in their careers by leaving Scotland to play in France and Germany respectively. At the time, they were a fair bit more experienced than Hickey is just now.

Bologna sounds like a really attractive move for a young lad of 18. When you think of the amount of games he has played in the Hearts first team, it is a large amount of money for the club to receive.

I just hope the lad has the maturity to deal with it on and off the pitch, buys into everything his new club are asking and really progresses his career. I would hate to see him get lost over there because he is very young to be making such a big move.

If I had been advising him, I would have been saying it was a wee bit too early for a big step like this. I really hope he goes on to have a stellar career.

Maybe one day we might see him in the full Scotland team but that will depend on whether he can play first-team football. Unfortunately for him, he has Andy Robertson and Kieran Tierney ahead of him for the left-back role.

In that sense he is playing in the worst position because those two are at another level. Hickey should be aspiring to get there now.

He is versatile and can play different positions, including right-back and centre-back as we’ve seen at Hearts. Like many others, I’ll be watching closely to see how he does.

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