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
Six Nations Championship Championship in 1910 with the addition of France. The tournament was expanded in 2000 to become the Six Nations Championship with the addition of Italy. Following the relative success of the Tier 2 nations in the 2015 Rugby World Cup, there were calls by Octavian Morariu, the president of Rugby Union's governing body for promotion and development, to let Georgia and Romania join the Six Nations due to their consistent success in the European Nations Cup and ability to compete in the Rugby World Cup. Played annually, the format of the Championship is simple: each team plays every other team