1997 Five Nations Championship 1997 Five Nations Championship The 1997 Five Nations Championship was the sixty-eighth series of the rugby union Five Nations Championship. Including the previous incarnations as the Home Nations and Five Nations, this was the hundred-and-third series of the northern hemisphere rugby union championship. Ten matches were played over five weekends from 18 January to 15 March, the crucial match being in Weekend 4 where England inexplicably threw away a 20-6 lead at Twickenham with quarter of the match to go and were pipped by France. France went on to win their first Grand Slam in ten years; England defeated the
Rugby union in Italy first win against a home nation, against Ireland in Treviso, in a Rugby World Cup warm up. In 1999, the domestic competition ran its 100th tournament, with Benetton Treviso winning the championship that year. In 2000, Italy joined the Five Nations Championships, turning the competition into the Six Nations Championship. In both the 2007 Six Nations and the 2013 Six Nations , Italy finished fourth, their best placing yet. The Italian national rugby union side have been playing international rugby since the late 1920s, and are categorized, by the International Rugby Board, as a tier one nation. They have competed