THE AFL yesterday admitted that timekeepers in Saturday night's Richmond-St Kilda clash at Telstra Dome mistakenly ended the game 11 seconds early and they would probably face a short suspension.

It is the second time in a week that AFL timekeepers have failed to stop the clock in the dying seconds of a game. Last week they robbed the Geelong-Fremantle game of 11 seconds.

The league yesterday admitted that the timekeepers failed to stop the clock in the final minute of the Saints' three-point win when umpire Stuart Wenn ordered St Kilda's Brendon Goddard to retake a kick-in after Richmond's Kel Moore had hit the post with a shot at goal.

Then, after Jack Riewoldt kicked for goal following the siren, Richmond coach Terry Wallace said that the missing seconds could have cost his side the game as Riewoldt would have had time to pass to a teammate closer to goal.

AFL football operations general manager Adrian Anderson, umpires boss Jeff Gieschen, and ground operations manager Jill Lindsay met Richmond football manager Paul Armstrong yesterday to examine replays of the incident and the printout from the timekeeping clock to clarify what happened.

"We got the footage, went through it with Paul Armstrong, we got the timekeepers' report from the clocks and went through it," Anderson said. "We pieced it together and realised the timekeepers had failed to stop the clock when Stuart Wenn called time-on when [he] recalled one of Goddard's kicks."

There is facility to alter the game clock when a mistake is realised, but that can only happen if the mistake is picked up during the quarter.

"There is a way of catching up time and they do do it sometimes. In this case they just missed it," Anderson said. "It's just a matter of getting it right with time-on and getting it right at the time.

"Richmond have made it very clear - there's no issue about the result, they're just frustrated that there was a timekeeper error, like we are.

"Mistakes occur during the course of the match, we just don't want it to be from the officials. This is a bad mistake and we need to make sure we minimise the likelihood of human error in these sorts of situations."

The AFL recently installed clocks that computerise the process of recording the time-ons through a game. Previously the timekeepers marked them down on a sheet of paper.