Niall McNamee admits Rhode would love to have Anton Sullivan and Jake Kavanagh for Sunday week's Leinster club SFC final against St. Vincent's.

After figuring in The Village's successful Offaly SFC campaign and the Leinster wins over Gusserane and Simonstown Gaels, the army duo left for a six-month tour of duty in Chad with the Defence Forces last week, and missed yesterday's win over Sean O'Mahony's.

"We'd nearly go out ourselves and bring them home," Offaly star McNamee told RTÉ.

"We knew for a long time out that they were going to be away and in fairness to the guys, they put their shoulder to the wheel for the whole year and got us to this stage.

"They played a huge part in that. We definitely missed them today in the dressing room, being a part of the group, on the bus. They text everyone [before the match] and they are in our thoughts for the game. In the last couple of weeks, other lads have stepped up, Darren Garry got his chance, Kieran Healy stepped in."

Rhode will hope to avenge their 2014 final loss to St. Vincent's, but McNamee - scorer of 0-8 in Drogheda - wasn't getting ahead of himself.

"All year we have been taking it one game at a time, we didn't really look beyond this game at all," he continued.

"There's a huge hunger here for this team to get better. That was what we said all year, to test ourselves to see how far we could go. To be honest, we didn't look at winning championships, we're just trying to get ourselves to be the best team we can be and see where it takes us."

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