My team have come stone, cold last. So why am I feeling so good?

Ok, I'm not feeling great but there's a sense that Adelaide have turned a corner.  The pressure of a terrible season is off, new players have been recruited, we're looking like we know how to score and we've won two games in a row for the first time this year. Happy(ish) days are here again.

More importantly, the overbearing feeling of gloom has started to lift from Hindmarsh. Hell, we might even have new owners soon.

But I'll believe that when I see the contract signed - and when I have a cast iron guarantee that we will not be moving all our games away from Hindmarsh to the concrete skating rink known as Adelaide Oval. There's another blog in that. A very angry one.

Back to the spoon though. To be ruthlessly honest, we deserved it. I'd go as far as to say we needed it. It gives us something to build next season on. If Gold Coast had managed to steal it from us by actually beating Fury and gifting them the less-than-coveted trophy it would have been too easy to pretend that this season had not been good enough. And that's the last thing we need. So I'm glad it's ours. We've had highs and we can deal with lows.

The spoon should stand in our trophy cabinet as a warning to future managers and squads that failure is a reality if you piss about for too long playing bad football and putting the wrong team on the park. That's what we did this year. Let's remember and learn from that mistake.

I'm very happy to donate a nice wooden cooking spoon, suitably engraved, if that will help.

I'd also like to say that I'm chuffed that Fury didn't win it. They've fought hard with minimal resources and it's great for their fans to reflect on NOT coming last. They have no history and starting at the bottom is not all it's cracked up to be (excuse the pun). Well done, Fury. We've got enough history and happy memories to cope with the spoon this year. Next year you're on your own.

Even as we mount that piece of woodenware in our trophy cabinet our minds are turned to the Asian Champions League. It would be disingenuous to ignore the irony of starting the 'Champions' League as wooden spooners. It would be even worse if we still looked like the team that ran around like headless chooks for most of the year. The team that thought 'shooting' was a botanical term.

But, all of a sudden, we're not that team. All of a sudden we have the newly mined riches of Flores, Boogaard, Griffiths and Van Dijk to supplement the youthful seam of gold we've discovered in Marrone and Leckie. Even Barbiero, Pants and Dodd seem to have discovered a reason to play well again. If Cassio and Reid come back to health and form we'll have a depth undreamt of earlier this year.

In short, the ACL no longer looms on the horizon like a humiliating trip to the headmaster's office to be told that "You're an embarrassment to the school". Now it's more like waiting for the results of an exam you'd been dreading but - when you actually sat it - turned out to be a lot less frightening than you imagined.

Many people (quite rightly) think it's insane that last year's top teams compete in this years' ACL. That may be. But in this instance it has worked for the Reds beautifully. We're not looking ahead at a long off-season with nothing to do but agonise over internal issues. Instead we're seriously looking at competing in a higher quality competition than the A-League finals promise to be.

So, thanks again to Sasa, Jonas, Ange and all those other boys who helped us win the right to play and gave us a chance at redemption in 2010.

To all our opponents in the ACL, remember us. We're that little club you'd never heard of. The one that was supposed to be an easy three points. The one with a salary cap that would pay for your dry-cleaning.

The one that made the final.

Well playmates, this year we've added a wooden spoon to our armoury. Watch out we don't spank you with it.

C'mon you REDS!