The Clare-born 19-year-old central defender, whose family moved to Spain when he was eight where his talent as a central defender brought him to the attention of Inter Milan, recently made his senior debut for the club in a pre-season friendly against Swiss side Lugano.

And in a further measure of how highly the Irish U18 international is regarded at the San Siro, he has since signed a new two-year contract with the Serie A giants and been made captain of the youth team.

But Italian legend Vialli understands better than most the kind of tough tests which lie ahead for the Irishman.

“The main challenge will be to get minutes under his belt, to get game time,” he says.

“You can get better by training with the first team but, at the end of the day, you need to be on the pitch playing and making mistakes and learning from that. The challenge is to convince the manager to give him some games. It might be, at some stage, that he might have to consider going on loan, play and then go back to Inter Milan when he is ready to break into the first team.”

There is probably no better place than Italy to learn the defensive trade but Vialli also cautions that, if he is to succeed at Inter, Nolan will have to cope with the win-at-all-costs mentality which prevails in Italy.

“When you lose a match it’s a disaster whether you make yourself proud or not, whether or not you fight to the very end,” he says. “Those don’t count in Italy. The only thing that counts is results.

“The way to get around that is to be very tactical. We don’t want to give anything away cheaply and are still probably the best out there at defending. But I hope he can bring something to the game. Sometimes we need somebody with a different mentality that adds something to our game and makes it a bit better.”

Vialli, of course, travelled in the opposite direction, the former Sampdoria and Juventus and Italy striker ending his playing days, and beginning his managerial career, in the Premier League at Stamford Bridge.

Still making his home in London, Vialli retains a strong emotional attachment to Chelsea.

“When they score a goal, if the wind blows in the right direction, I can get the noise in my garden which is only about 15 minutes walk away,” he says. “It is my English club. I watch it on Sky Italia so it’s broadcast by satellite and there’s a few seconds’ delay so sometimes I get the roar before I see the goal on TV!”

Vialli believes it “was a very wise choice” by Chelsea to appoint another Italian manager, former Napoli boss Maurizio Sarri, as successor to Antonio Conte.

“Italian managers have been extremely successful at the club for the last 20 years,” he observes. “Mr Sarri is very capable. He’s a very good coach and very good at developing players and making them better.

He’s got a lot of experience from coaching at many different levels and he’s a real scholar of the game. I think throughout his years he’s managed to work out a successful method. He doesn’t improvise, he knows exactly what he is doing. He makes his teams play some very exciting and entertaining football. Most of the time it’s very precise and I enjoy watching it.

Vialli has clearly also derived a huge amount of enjoyment from his engagement with gaelic football as manager of Erin’s Isle — and rival to Harry Redknapp’s Castlehaven — in AIB’s series, The Toughest Rivalry.

“It is quite rare that you see guys playing a game just for the passion of the game, without being paid, just for the love of it and representing their parish,” he reflects. “All of this was new to me and reminded me of where I started in football, in the oratory system in Italy, but I was fascinated to find out more about it bit by bit. It grew into me very quickly.

“You need to be unbelievably fit for gaelic football. The pitch is huge, it looks like an airport to me! And there are not that many players to cover it so it really is a physical game with a lot of physical contact and the pace of the game is very fast and furious. It really takes your breath away.

“Tactically it is very different and you need to be an all-rounder. You need to be fast but able to run for 60 to 70 minutes so it’s like sprinting continuously. You need to able to take the blows, need to be courageous and pass the ball with your feet and fist. It takes a lot of skill to play this game.”

The final three episodes of ‘The Toughest Rivalry’, which will include all the action from the eagerly anticipated rematch of the 1998 club semi-final between Erin’s Isle and Castlehaven — managed, respectively, by Gianluca Vialli and Harry Redknapp — will air on Friday, August 17th and every Friday following that, exclusively on AIB’s social channels.