Broadcaster Les Murray has claimed Neill mutinied against Verbeek and moments before the match began, he wiped the whiteboard cleanand told players to forget the Dutchman's "bullshit" tactics.

FFA CEO Ben Buckley last night defended Neill's record as Australian captain and insisted no-one with the Socceroos could recall the incident.

But today Lucas Neill finally spoke out and defended himself against the accusations, contained in Murray's new book, The World Game.

"I'm on holiday and absolutely shocked by this," he told Fox Sports News by phone from the US this morning. "I'm a little bit angry.

"It's clearly not true from my point of view and easy to quantify. I'd like to know how it came about? If it's just a way to sell a book then so be it - I've seen it done before.

"But I don't want it to be me, and my name, and my reputation and all the hard work that we try to do for football, to be probably looking bad in public opinion at the moment which is not what I want.

"Because it was a year ago, you wrack your brains trying to remember what happened but clearly, what's been read to me - because I haven't even read it myself - is just stunning.

"I'm trying to get hold of Mark Schwarzer now because we were talking before the game about how we were going to approach it.

"And in the end Schwarzie started talking in the changing room before the game and before we knew it, it was time to go out..

"I didn't actually get to give my captain's speech, which the boys will tell you is something I like to do before the game.

"So on that particular night, I didn't even get to make a speech."

He denied asking Verbeek to leave the dressing room so he could address the players or scrubbing the whiteboard.

"I can't recall anything like that," he said. "I can remember a whiteboard being in there but nothing like that.

"We're a team and we shake hands as a group of 40, and that includes backroom staff, medical staff, no-one gets the opportunity to go out early.

"I as a captain, I certainly wouldn't tell everyone to go out the room on one of the greatest nights in any player's life. The subs go out a little bit early but that's right at the death.

"Players will be high-fiving each other and geeing each other up. We have all our meetings before the game. Anything that gets done, gets done on a computer.

"We sit there as a group of 23 players and go over the tactics and when we go into the changing rooms, it's just about putting the last reminders up and refreshing each other's memory.

"But usually that doesn't get done on a little whiteboard, that gets done in a little speech."

Neill also paid tribute to former coach Verbeek and defended his legacy.

"Pim got judged on 16 games in that era and everyone only remembers that game," he said. "We got beat 4-0 and it was tragic, it was tragic for the team, tragic for Australia.

"It was disappointing in hindsight. Could we have done something different? Of course, we could have, but that's hindsight. Everyone wants to have hindsight. 

"From the point of view of going out on the pitch, the response to losing 4-0 was amazing.

"I firmly played my part as did many of the others in picking the team up and getting it to go again and trying to qualify from a position we probably didn't deserve to qualify from.

"Pim won us so many great games in tough places to win games. He got us to the World Cup with time to spare.

"That's credit to a man who, okay, didn't go down well in everyone's books, but as a captain I'm not going to undermine that guy. He's my manager. He's my boss.

"Whatever he says, I'm going to get all boys believing in that."

He added: "Unfortunately in the first game, we made a mistake and it cost us very dearly.

"He did a great job with the Socceroos. Had we held on or won the game against Ghana or had Germany beat Ghana by a lot more in their final game, we would have qualified to the next round.

"We would have played the USA, might have played Uruguay - who knows?

"Did he do a good job? Yeah. Did we do a good job in that first game? No, we didn't - and that's what killed our tournament.

"Had we gone on to qualify from the group and gone on to great things, you would have been calling Pim one of the greatest managers ever to coach Australia.

"Tactically, he got us to the World Cup so he must have been doing something right, and he was making the best decisions he could with the squad available to him.

"Did he play the exciting football we like seeing in the English Premier League every week? Probably not. It was effective in every other game than the Germany game.

"Could we have done things different? Of course but you can only judge that afterwards."

He added: "What did Germany do next? They beat Argentina by a helluva lot, they beat England, they embarrassed teams.

"So we lost 4-0 but in the end that didn't look too shameful because we had 10-men. There's so many ways you can look at it.

"But it's just unfair to make me a scapegoat and say that I've undermined a manager and said Pim's a bad manager. That's not true. He had one bad game out of 16.

"I didn't want to make a big deal out of this but it's my name that's at stake now. I know that I can look Pim in the eye and know that I did everything for my manager when I was at the World Cup."