THERE IS MORE TO POINTLESS THAN YOU THINK.

The evenings are drawing in and Pointless on BBC 1 is one of few options to wile away a few minutes once the light fades and gardening is impossible. An early Pointless exercise was to name African countries in the alphabet after Kenya! Woohoo!! So a bad answer was Nigeria and a good one was Sao Tome and Principe. (there are some Portuguese accents thrown into the name but my keyboard doesn't do them).

This is a pair of archipelagos set around the two main islands (87 miles apart) about 150 miles west of the Gabon coastline. The population is just over 160,000 and there is a significant Portuguese influence.

So there is football! 16 teams compete in the "national leagues" founded in 1977, with the Sao Tome (10 clubs) champions taking on the Principe (6 clubs) champions in a Cup play off. In Sao Tome there are enough players to form three levels of football.

A member of CAF, the Federacao Santomense de Futebol controls the local foootball and national team. The first international was played in 1979 against Chad and there was a 5-0 defeat. Ranked 157 in FIFA, the country plays in the Central African Games with limited success and with sizeable breaks between entering the competition. They managed a draw with Angola in 1987 and a first victory over Equatorial Guinea 2-0 in 1999 and a second win over Sierra Leone also 2-0 with a draw put them 179th in ranking.There have been several withdrawals from important competitions and therefore a decline in status but an atempt to qualify for the 2014 World Cup did re-establish the nations reputation somewhat.

Most recently in June, they have played in qualifying games for the African Nations Cup, against the Cape Verde Islands (lost 1-7 Leal scored their goal), then Morocco (lost 0-3) in September and beat Ethiopia 1-0 on 8th October 2015. Leal scored the winner in the 87 minute. Finally Ethiopia won 3-0 in the return match.