The Cottagers played 18 European fixtures on their way to Hamburg, only to agonisingly fall at the last hurdle against Atletico Madrid. But Northern Ireland international Hughes knows the positives far outweigh the negatives when he looks back on the season just finished. In particular, Hughes recalls the tense Group E clash against Basel at St Jakob-Park in mid-December - a match which the visitors won 3-2 to snatch second place and progress at the expense of their Swiss rivals. Hughes told the club's official website: "Everyone thinks of the games against Shakhtar, Juventus, Wolfsburg and Hamburg but we still had to get out of the group stage and that wasn't easy. "Basel were no pushovers and Sofia gave us two tough games (a 1-1 draw in Bulgaria and a 1-0 win at Craven Cottage) - then you've obviously got Roma in there. "I think over the course of the whole campaign, the one thing that stuck out was the fact that we just played our own football. No one can say that we had any help from referees or had any extra luck in games that we didn't deserve. Everything we achieved, we worked hard for and fully deserved. "Even after the first leg of the Juventus game, a lot of teams could have just thought 'right, we're finished; we'll just go out and give it a shot'. But even though we were 3-1 down after the first leg, we didn't really see anything out there that frightened us. "We conceded three bad goals in Italy but apart from that, there was nothing that we were really disappointed about. We played well out there so we thought that if we could get them at the Cottage and not concede bad goals, there would be no reason why we couldn't score a few goals ourselves. "That proved to be the case so we've always believed in what we've done, believed in our own ability and in our style of play. That's what got us our success."
