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 other Home Nations by large margins to win the Triple Crown. It was the last time that France played at the Parc des Princes, in Paris. Since then, the French team has been playing in the Stade de France, also in Paris.[1]
The teams involved were: