If the three hapless hosts (the ones who weren't Ms Cunty Sausage) had been honest in Tuesday's semi-final, they would've come right out at the start and said, "We're only putting eight of tonight's songs through to the final, and that's pushing it, because none of the others are good enough."
That would've left 12 places free for tonight's much better selection of songs and given us a better final on Saturday. However, it didn't happen, so some of the crap had to go through and some better tunes will stare disappointment in the face later tonight.
I correctly predicted eight of the ten qualifiers here on Tuesday afternoon. On the night, after watching all sixteen songs, I predicted nine correctly, because I added Hungary to my qualifiers and ditched Moldova, which turned out to be an accurate double move. I was only scuppered by believing that Finland was different enough to get through, and that being after the ad break was enough to kill off Greece, (as it was to end Denmark's Eurovision).
So, predicting tonight. The top and bottom seem easy, but there are five in the middle fighting for two places, I reckon.
Let's immediately rule out San Marino and Portugal. No one loves them, outside of Portugal and... well, just outside of Portugal.
Definitely qualifying, working from the end, are Slovenia, Cyprus, Sweden, Azerbaijan and Israel (my favourite song of all forty this year). That's five.
Norway is after a break, but so was Greece and this is so monstrously good that it has to qualify. Six.
Montenegro is superb, but has been placed in slot 5 and is noticeably devoid of any neighbours or allies (aside from Australia actually, with its Balkan decendants). But, I'm relying on the niche semi-final audience to like 'this kind of song' (and personally I really do), so that's seven.
Most of my friends are predicting success for Latvia, which would please me no end, so I'll make that number eight.
That leaves us with five songs to fill two remaining places, and they're skewed towards the beginning of the show; Lithuania, Ireland, Malta, Czech Republic, Iceland, Switzerland and Poland.
I would never normally discount the last song to perform. After all, only two end songs in fifteen semi-finals have failed to qualify since 2008, and one of those, from Moje 3, was 11th. Only De Toppers have had a disaster from last slot, so we could conclude that unless your song is cheesy rubbish or in Serbian, the last song will always get through. But confidence in Poland seems low from friends and media, due to the song just not being strong enough and a disappointingly weak choice from the organisers with which to end the show. However, with Germany, Ireland and the UK all voting tonight, I'm going to keep the faith and say Poland will do it. I'm also going to pick Lithuania, because people will love it anyway, it'll get the gay vote (antics on stage!) and there's also the UK and Ireland to give their traditional helping hands too.
That means I think Ireland, Malta, Czech Republic (which I'd love to see go through), Iceland and Switzerland are on their way home, along with Portugal and San Marino. I will now bet accordingly, using Paddy Power NOT to place a bet on Ireland. Sad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
No comments:
Post a Comment