The Socceroo left Melbourne City at the end of the 2015/16 A-League season and partook in the last three FFA Cup games for Sydney and the 4-0 demolition of Western Sydney Wanderers in the season opener on Saturday.

The Sky Blues are back at Allianz Stadium to face Central Coast Mariners on Saturday and subsequently play Canberra Olympic in the nation’s capital four days later in the FFA Cup semi-final.

“It’s been a long pre-season and it’s been really good to be involved in the FFA Cup and have some competitive games to look forward to instead of playing friendlies every week, so that’s been great,” Wilkinson told FourFourTwo.

“We’re up to the semi-finals with Canberra next week, great start to the season now and great crowd, great atmosphere tonight and to go out and win the derby, first game 4-0 is all we would have ever asked for.”

Wilkinson reflected on the record breaking Sydney Derby which attracted more than 60,000 fans to ANZ Stadium.

He praised goalkeeper Danny Vukovic for providing crucial saves from venomous shots from Kerem Bulut and Mitch Nichols and believed the Sky Blues took their chances when needed.

 “Probably not (a 4-0 game), we took our chances well, first half was an arm-wrestle," Wilkinson said.

"We started pretty well and we had a number of reasonable chances and also a number where our last ball could have been a bit better and it probably killed us.

“I don’t think we kept the ball well enough, the second half was a bit better in that regard and we took our chances early in the half, we went 2-0 up and we probably went into our shells a little bit and dropped deep.

“It’s just a natural thing to do when you go up I suppose and you want to protect your lead and in doing that you tend to drop off a bit, so that was a bit disappointing.

“At half-time we were reasonably happy defensively with how we were going, we probably needed to improve when we had the ball.”