Ireland host France on Saturday at 5pm knowing the French have lost three consecutive games. It’s something that doesn’t happen often and France will be furiously trying to end their own streak while extending Ireland’s losing run.

Losing three Six Nations games on the bounce is something that France have never done in the Six Nations era (2000-present). In all matches, however, they went through a similar run just last year when losing games to England (22-24), Wales (9-16) and Argentina (20-23); they then went out and thrashed the Pumas 49-10 to end the streak.

The French lost three games in a row in 2008 and 2003 after doing so not once but twice in 1999. The pre-millennium year was the final year of the Five Nations championship and France went out with a whimper, losing to Wales, England and eventual champions Scotland on the final day. Later the same year they’d lose to Tonga, New Zealand and Wales. Not a good vintage, 1999. But it had probably been due; one has to look back all the way to 1990 to find the next three match losing streak by a French side.

The last time France lost four games in a row? 1989. The victors: New Zealand (x2), a Lions XV and Australia. The time before that? A five match losing run between the 1981 and 1982 seasons that they stopped with a win against Ireland in Parc des Princes. 

In the search for further French wreckage we skip past a four match losing run in 1974-75 before shuddering to a halt to gaze in wonder at a losing streak between 1968 and 1969 that was of almost majestic carnage.

Beginning in July 1968 the French had ten losses on the bounce followed by a draw against Wales in Colombes. True, the losses included three games in New Zealand but they also included a game against Romania. Amazingly (and, if one is to invoke just a tiny guilty sliver of national stereotyping, so wonderfully French) the team that went on that streak had won a Five Nations Grand Slam just months before.

Ireland have had three losing streaks of ten games in their rugby history. The first two both came in the late 19th century, the very earliest years of international rugby. The third is far more recent, coming between October 1991 and spring of 1993. The early 90s were dark days for the Irish game, intermittently brightened by the blonde whirling dervish that was Simon Geoghegan on the right wing.

New Zealand’s last losing streak of more than two games occurred in the 1998 Tri Nations when they lost five in a row, just one off their all-time record losing streak of six in 1949. Only one other time since 1903 have New Zealand teams lost more than three games in a row, that coming back in 1929/30 when they had a four game losing run.

France’s longest ever losing streak? 18 games between 1911 and 1920, interrupted by the First World War. The French losing that many games in a row wasn’t unusual for the time; in France’s first 31 international games, which includes that 18 game run, they won precisely one. They ended that 1-31 streak with a 15-7 win over Ireland at Lansdowne Road on April 3rd, 1920.

On Saturday Freddie Michalak will run out at the new Lansdowne Road trying to break a current French losing streak while extending one of his own. The mercurial halfback has won all six matches he’s played against Ireland. 

Whatever happens on Saturday, one of those two streaks is ending.

This piece was published as part of the Balls.ie O2 Rugby Nerds preview of Ireland vs. France.