In late November at Etihad Stadium A-League leaders Melbourne Victory beat Adelaide United 2-1, a game less memorable than the fan walkout 30 minutes into the match. While the win cemented Victory’s place atop the ladder it condemned Adelaide to another week of holding it up; the loss increasing the Reds’ winless start to the season to an eighth-straight game.

But if Adelaide’s players, staff and fans went in search of a positive – and just as a passenger on a listing ship will hunt desperately for a life preserver, you can be sure they did – they might have found it in the 60 minutes that followed Oliver Bozanic’s first goal for Victory that put the home side 2-0 ahead. Adelaide’s collective chins remained up, their midfield industry increased, and a late penalty to Marcelo Carrusca was no less than they deserved. As luckless as new coach Guillermo Amor must have been feeling at that point, and as much as he might have tried to transport his mind to his happy place (which, perhaps, is the interior of the Mestalla Stadium the night he scored Barcelona’s opening goal in the 1990 Copa del Rey final against Real Madrid), he still knew he had plenty to work with.

Since that night at the Etihad, Adelaide’s fortunes have changed sharply. In the nine matches that have followed the Reds are unbeaten; winning seven, drawing two, and scoring 17 goals while conceding only four. Finding the net more often has certainly helped turn the tide – Carrusca, Craig Goodwin and Pablo Sanchez have all contributed on this front though, worryingly, striker Bruce Djite still has more yellow cards (two) than outfield goals (one) this season – but it’s Adelaide’s defence that has become suddenly staunch after being as leaky as an embattled caucus during a string of diabolical poll results.

Often players put down a long stretch of poor results to nothing more than a lack of confidence and they swear, trying to convince themselves as much as us, you suspect, that a single win could turn things around. Yet sometimes they’re right. We can talk about formations and tactics and playing personnel until we punch our cards for the last time but football games are influenced by other, less observable, less tangible, markers. Woody Allen once quipped that “confidence is what you have before you understand the problem”, but American football coach and prolific quote-generator Vince Lombardi opined that “confidence is contagious” and sport so often bears that out.

Adelaide, then, have rediscovered their mojo, the kind last seen under Amor’s predecessor Josep Gombau – when they played with considerable flair without quite the consistent steeliness to claim the biggest prizes (the 2014 FFA Cup notwithstanding). As a result they go into round 18 against Sydney on Friday in sixth place on the ladder and almost in a position of comfort, what with a seven point buffer between them and seventh-placed Perth. Indeed a win in Adelaide against the Sky Blues – who are currently stumbling after consecutive losses – could, temporarily at least, promote the Reds into third spot on the ladder.

After such a remarkable turnaround it would be something of a shame for Adelaide to drop the ball now, although the events of 2013-14 show that catching up to the field can indeed come back to bite you down the stretch. Then, under Gombau, in his first year on the job, the Reds began in similarly diabolical fashion to this season, with just one win in their first nine matches. Yet by round 19, showing the deftness of a barefoot flamenco dancer on a hot tin roof, they’d climbed to third on the ladder – only to fall away to finish sixth, and then be eliminated in the first weekend of finals by the Central Coast. And that was without the extra demands of Asian Champions League football.

On Tuesday night, the Reds host Chinese Super League’s Shandong Luneng Taishan in an ACL play-off. Win and they’ll put themselves into the group stage of the competition. The demands of qualification include six games between late February and early May, half of them requiring midweek trips to Japan, South Korea and Thailand, not to mention compromised recoveries and A-League preparations, and numerous, enervating battles for window seats.

Adelaide would no doubt love to reacquaint themselves with the ACL – and they are expecting to, adding former star striker Sergio van Dijk to their 24-man ACL roster (which means Pablo Sanchez and Iacopo La Rocca miss out)– but doing so will surely increase the difficulty in maintaining their A-League charge. Squads aren’t big enough for two campaigns if injuries hit. While Western Sydney Wanderers managed OK in 2014 (winning the ACL in November after finishing second in the league and making the grand final) they were already sitting in second place on the ladder by the time their ACL commitments began. They’d bought themselves the insurance of a few losses. Indeed, in their final seven regular season games, conducted whilst they were involved in the ACL, the Wanderers won just two.

Adelaide are flying, but after their poor start they don’t have the luxury of losing momentum. Friday’s game at Coopers Stadium, then, kicks off a telling few months for the Reds.