EVEN those of us for whom the back pages of the daily paper - or even of this one - are unknown territory can't have missed the sports news totally in recent months.

From that triumphal rugby world cup win to Tim Henman reaching the semi-finals of the French Open, the first British tennis player to do so for 41 years, sport has been making the front pages, and I have to say that, over breakfast, it beats the heck out of war and politics.

Things have gone downhill a bit in the last week, of course, with Henman crashing out of the Stella Artois Championship at Queens and the All Blacks belting the daylights out of us on their own territory (though we got our own back at cricket), but we're now in the throes of this summer's major event. Athens may think it's going to be the Olympics, but we know otherwise. I just wish I'd thought of, and patented, that little clip which holds a mini flagpole, plus flag, to car windows. They must have sold in their millions, with at least one car in every half dozen bearing up to four flags.

A larger version hangs out of bedroom windows or is pinned across the back of the cabs on builders' lorries - and I even saw one being used as the tail-end vehicle marker on an Army convoy on Saturday - but it's the little 'uns which have grabbed the market.

They're the cross of St George, of course, sometimes with the word England or the three lions badge superimposed, though I did see a lone St Andrew's saltire. I checked with the office footie buffs who assured me I hadn't misread the fixture list; Scotland hadn't qualified for Europe. A genuine expression of patriotism there, then, as opposed to Euromania?

We all know the St George's flags will vanish if England's hopes do the same. If we win, they won't survive for long - or will they? On the school run more than a decade ago, we used to try to spot the last surviving radiator-mounted, fading Comic Relief red nose each year.

This summer it might be the last, tattered flag. As they've caught on so fast and so firmly, however, it seems impossible that the advertising world and campaign managers haven't seen their potential.

Four coupons off the cereal box for a cartoon character flag, perhaps, to take advantage of pester power; support for - or campaigning against - hunting; membership of English Heritage or the WI, or even a personal expression of opinion. Me, I'd have a jolly roger.

When you think how people have adorned their vehicles over the years, with tiger's tails, fluffy dice, nodding dogs and their names at the top of the windscreen, flags do at least have the virtue of being right out of the driver's line of vision.

But they might just have a downside. As we seemed to be teetering on the rim of another petrol crisis when the flags first appeared in force, it does occur to me that the physicists among us might like to calculate the drag factor of a flag on each corner of the average family saloon.