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 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 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 manager Adrian Anderson, umpires' boss Jeff Gieschen and ground operations manager Jill Lindsay met Richmond football manager Paul Armstrong yesterday morning 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 Tissot 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 happen only 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 state-of-the-art clocks made by Tissot — the AFL timekeepers now even wear Tissot shirts — that computerise the process of recording the time-ons throughout a game. Previously the timekeepers marked them down on a sheet of paper.

Anderson said the issue was purely human error and nothing to do with the clocks.

"The new (clocks) work very well … but it doesn't remove the potential for human error.

" I don't think there is a way of eliminating human involvement or the potential for human error, you just have to minimise that as best we can.

"The umpiring department have counselled all the timekeepers about their responsibilities at the end of games like this, the importance of watching for time-on and we're still getting mistakes. So we're disappointed by that.

"It's not uncommon when there is a bad mistake for an official to be suspended from duties for a period of time and I'm sure Jeff and the umpiring department will assess what is appropriate in this case."

Speaking after the match, Wallace said the AFL needed to be held to account, given fines were regularly dished out to clubs.