ON RUGBY/Edmund Van Esbeck: With the fourth series of matches in the Six Nations Championship all due to be played tomorrow, the focus of attention will be on Lansdowne Road, Murrayfield and Twickenham.

At Lansdowne Road, it is Ireland against Italy, at Murrayfield, Scotland play France and, at Twickenham, England take on Wales.

With each country having two matches to play, three nations are still in with a chance of winning the title - Ireland, England and France - and France still entertain Grand Slam hopes.

If events follow the expected course tomorrow, Ireland England and France will all win. Should this be the case, then all three will go into the final series of the championship, a fortnight hence, with championship ambitions still alive.

This championship has graced the scene since the 1880s, first as the Four Nations, then the Five Nations and, since the advent of Italy in 2000, the Six Nations.

One very appealing element of the series through the years has been that expectation has not always been matched by realisation. Many an upset has marked the series.

The Irish have been centre-stage in quite a few, both in a positive and negative nature. Over the the last four years, the England team has had to endure being on the wrong end of surprises. It all helps to make the championship the great competition that it has been and continues to be.

The French, with three wins from three matches, will be anxious enough about facing Scotland in Murrayfield.

It is 14 years since Wales last won at Twickenham and it will be a major surprise if the Welsh end that sequence tomorrow.

Based on current form, an Irish win over Italy is certainly a reasonable expectation.

Having beaten both Ireland and Scotland, there is a Triple Crown at stake for England against the Welsh. Should Ireland beat Italy and, irrespective of the result from Murrayfield, the Ireland-France match in Paris in a fortnight will still be crucial in terms of the championship.

If Ireland beat France, then the championship could yet again be decided on points-difference, as indeed it was in October when England lost in Dublin, but beat Ireland on points-difference.

A French win tomorrow and again against Ireland will, of course, mean that the championship will be won by France for the first time since 1998. It would also have the added bonus of a Grand Slam.

That would mean that, irrespective of the result of the Italy-England match on Sunday fortnight, the championship will have been decided the previous afternoon in Paris.

Thus all the possibilities, but what seems the most likely scenario as we look forward to the matches this weekend, is that the destination of the title will not be decided until the last series of matches in a fortnight.

Just as low-scoring matches are now very much a rarity, long gone are the days of 3-0 wins, and 0-0 drawn encounters.

Indeed, over the last 10 years only two matches have been drawn. Ireland drew with Scotland in 1994 and last season Wales and Scotland drew.

Now a draw at Murrayfield or one at Twickenham would not be unwelcome from an Irish perspective.

For quite some time before Italy succeeded in gaining admission to the Six Nations Championship, the Italians had a team capable of testing all of the countries in the championship, indeed capable of beating some, too, as Ireland discovered, not once, but three times.

The match tomorrow will be the eighth match between the countries. The score stands at Ireland four, the Italians three.

The first meeting of the countries was at Lansdowne Road in 1988. Ireland won the match 31-15. The second match was in Treviso in May 1995.

It proved to be a revealing exercise for Ireland who were well beaten 22-12 and failed to score a try with Paul Burke accounting for Ireland's 12 points with four penalty goals.

Tomorrow, there will be one survivor on the Ireland team from that match, number eight Anthony Foley. A man who did some damage to Ireland that afternoon in Treviso was outside half Diego Dominguez.

The Italians scored some very notable wins in the late 1990s. In 1997, Italy beat France 40-32, beat Ireland in Dublin in January 1997, 37-29, and 37-22 in Bologna in December 1997.

Unfortunately for the Italians, with so many of the players who had carved out those fine results in 1990s now gone, the Six Nations series has proved to be very hard going.

But this season they did give both France and Scotland worthy opposition. But loss of players, internal strife and other unfortunate factors has seen Italian rugby decline.

However, Ireland would do well not to be in any way complacent tomorrow. Too well Ireland should know what it is to be on the wrong end of the unexpected.