The Anatomy of a Transfer #2: 🗣️ ‘I was too young to appreciate Italy… now I’d love to go back’
Despite Covid, Brexit, loneliness and homesickness, Scotland star Aaron Hickey made a rapid and memorable impact for ‘I Rossoblù’
By Stephen McGowan
Orchestrator of the transfer which triggered the influx of Scots to Italian football, Neil Hickey would offer one piece of advice to Lennon Miller, Kieron Bowie or any other young player preparing to join Serie A: panning for gold takes patience. Time-intensive and physically demanding, it offers no guarantee of instant payback. La Dolce Vita won’t necessarily transpire in Year One.
“Aaron was fortunate because he hit the ground running,” says his father now. “Even Lewis Ferguson took more time at Bologna. [Late former Bologna head coach] Siniša Mihajlović didn’t start him for a while.
“So I would advise boys to be like Lewis and be prepared for the possibility that you might not start immediately. Listen, learn and work. Lewis has a great career at Bologna but he had to dig in at first and go through the football change.
“That was part of the reason I took Aaron there. I knew that his style of football would suit Italy.”
A move which opened up a new frontier for Ferguson, Josh Doig, Scott McTominay, Billy Gilmour, Che Adams, Miller and Bowie, Hickey left Hearts for Bologna in the summer of 2020.
Before turning down Bayern Munich and Celtic, his father had carefully studied his first-team chances and come to the conclusion that Bologna offered the best odds of an early breakthrough. So it proved after the opening day of the league season when a red card for Dutch left-back Mitchell Dijks late in a 2-0 defeat to Milan opened a window of opportunity.
Shortly after they arrived on Italian soil, Aaron phoned his dad — the voice he listened to before all others — to appraise him of the outcome of a training-ground bounce game.
“I said, ‘How did it go?’ And he said to me, ‘Good’. I asked what ‘good’ meant and he replied, ‘Good, good.’
“And I thought, ‘Oh….’ I asked how many touches he got compared to the other defenders and he said, ‘More’. But it wasn’t just more than the other defenders. It was more than anyone.
“An agent then called me up and said that Siniša Mihajlović couldn’t believe how well he played in the bounce game and planned to start him.”
With Dijks suspended, Bologna took on Parma at home and Hickey played for 80 minutes. He was picked for the next game as well, a 1-0 defeat to Benevento. Defying his youth and relative inexperience, he had made himself a difficult player to leave out. So it was in a new country, in a different spotlight, at Bologna.
While life was progressing well on the football side, the process of settling in Italy was proving more challenging off the field due to the disruption caused by Brexit and coronavirus.
The second wave of Covid-19 hit a badly impacted nation. By October 14, the number of positive cases was exceeding Italy’s peak in March. By November, the country was back in lockdown, divided into red, orange and yellow zones. A national curfew was imposed from 10pm until 5am as well as compulsory weekend closure for shopping malls and higher education institutions. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described the situation as “particularly critical”.
“The first season was tough because the streets were empty,” Aaron recalls now. “That was a difficult time for someone my age to go abroad and play for the first time.”
His father joined him in Italy for a few months to help with the transition. By then, they hoped, the defender would be establishing a life and routine and social circle of his own. Thanks to Covid, the process was a good deal harder than they ever anticipated.
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