Caravella put in an excellent performance against Sydney FC, much to the delight of his boss.

Bleiberg was just as pleased that his team demonstrated that it could compete without Socceroos midfielder Jason Culina.

In my book, Zenon was man of the match for the effort he put in," Bleiberg said.

"He ran a marathon (against Sydney), usually a player runs about 10km in a game, he did double that.

"We said we were going to have a good team and we have good team, we said we were going to depth and we have depth, we said Robson could do a job when Jason wasn't there and we did that," he said.