Jese won’t get treated here like I was at Barca... we’ll look after him EXCLUSIVE

THE FINAL pitch to new Stoke forward Jese Rodriguez was made over coffee in a hotel in Staffordshire. The empathy came from his new manager Mark Hughes.

‘You try and remember the situations you were once in,’ explained Hughes.

‘You are thinking that he may feel he doesn’t wanna be here so you recognise that and say, “I know it’s difficult to leave Paris Saint- Germain but I have been there and I know that it’s like”. You try and touch on things that resonate with him and go from there. I know what players who come here from abroad need to be successful with us.’

Hughes is talking specifically about the season he spent as a Barcelona player. It is well known he wasn’t successful after leaving Manchester United for the Nou Camp in 1986, less so how unhappy he was in Spain.

In fact, he didn’t even want to join in the first place.

‘We make sure the players have everything they need here but that didn’t happen with me,’ Hughes told Sportsmail. ‘Fundamentally I didn’t really want to go and when I got there the experience of being alone with no language wasn’t easy.

‘I had only recently moved out of digs at United even though I was in the first team. People wouldn’t believe it now when they look at the money going to kids who are never likely to be near a Premier League team. But that was where I was at. Terry Venables (then Barca coach) did his best and his mate sorted me somewhere to live but apart from that there was no help. I was just left to my own devices.

‘I assumed things like a car would be in place but they were not. I rented one for months and it cost me an arm and a leg. I was just naive.

‘I had just got in the United team and all of a sudden this huge club abroad wanted me and it escalated. I wasn’t the kind of guy who’d say “Hang on a minute, I don’t really want this”. All of a sudden I was on a plane. Nobody asked me, “Do you really want to go?”. I was just a young guy from a small town near Wrexham and I didn’t really know what I was doing.’

Hughes’ impact at Barcelona was modest. That of ‘Jese’, signed on loan from PSG, has been immediate, a goal at home to Arsenal giving Stoke a win against a top-six team for the first time in over a season.

Despite improvements on and off the field, Stoke is not a glamorous club. There was a time in Hughes’ 14-year career as a club manager that his name was enough to attract new signings. Now it takes a little longer. ‘They have only heard of the top six managers and my name, to a modern player, doesn’t mean much,’ he smiled.

‘They are like, “Who is this Mark Hughes? I have never heard of him”. But they Google who I’ve played for and managed and think that maybe I do know something after all.

‘If we get someone in a room we can pitch a compelling case. They come here and think, “It’s quite nice, pitches are OK”.

‘Normally we get to speak to them because they aren’t playing or their coach doesn’t like them. So first they want to know if they are going to play. We are a good team but if we want to push forward we need the next level player.

‘We can’t always afford to buy them so this is what we do. And when they are with us, we’ll give them everything they need.’ HUGHES was a bull of a centre forward and can be a bullish manager. But not all of it comes naturally to him. For example, standing in front of his squad can still make him nervous.

‘If someone just walked in and tried to do it then it would scare them witless,’ he said. ‘For me that’s something out of my comfort zone, too. Of course it is. It’s not my personality.

‘I am not front of house. I am different. But I do it because it’s part of my job. And it’s more stimulating because you force yourself to do things you are not comfortable with.’

Hughes, still only 53, has always been a different person on or off the field or touchline.

He may not class himself as ‘front of house’ but he still believes he is the one person who may have been able to save Eric Cantona that night at Crystal Palace.

Hughes’ was the Frenchman’s strike partner at United the season Cantona leaped into the Selhurst Park stands in 1995. But that night he was at home with an injured knee.

‘I think I am the only person who thinks I may have prevented it,’ he laughed.

‘There were times when Eric’s eyes would just go black and that was it, you had lost him.