Finally, here’s a look at the detailed semi-final results, although we don’t have much detail to add as the Eurovision website is not telling us the individual rankings for each song. I’d like to know, for example, who Malta ranked 11th! Usually I’d be inclined to say that that’s geeky knowledge, but actually it was a public vote which many paid for…I’m sure individual broadcasters have that data available, via Freedom of Information requests, but I do think it should be collated and added somewhere public. Anyway, on to Tuesday…
It’s interesting how long it takes Sweden (Tattoo) to get near Finland (Cha Cha Cha) in the first semi-final, but ultimately it was Finland who dominated, with an impressive seven 12s, five 10s and two 8s - meaning 150 of their 177 points came from being ranked within the top 3 of each audience vote.
The race for 10th spot is the point of interest in these semi-finals and SF1 provides a much closer race between Serbia (Samo mi se spava) and Latvia (Aljā). In this run, selected at random, Serbia dramatically clinch a qualification spot at the expense of Latvia at the penultimate round. Their audience vote would suffer on Saturday in the Grand Final, and without much jury support, Serbia eventually ended up 24th out of 26. At the time, and I still agree, Malta’s scoreboard performance didn’t make their on-stage or Eurovision-week performances and appearances at all -something which I think still remains a little unexplained.
On Thursday, semi-final 2 was a much more ‘open’ affair on paper and the results here (shown again in a random order) confirm that. Keep an eye on the ‘highest points’ tally - it’s much more spread than SF1. We see a nice switching of leaders through this run and at one point Austria (Who The Hell is Edgar?) and Cyprus (Break a Broken Heart) were tied, with 6 countries within four points of each other. By the second half it’s Austria and Australia (Promise) who battle it out for first spot and are tied on points as the vote begins to reach its climax.
Two countries failed to score (San Marino (Like An Animal) and Romania (D.G.T. (Off and On)), with Greece (What They Say) and Denmark (Breaking My Heart) waiting until the second half of this run to register any points at all. There’s little to say about the race for 10th spot on this one as the audience clearly had a lot of interest in the final top 10, with a 30 point difference between Estonia (Bridges) in 10th and Iceland (Power) in 11th.
I think it’s also worth pointing out what impact SF2 had on the Grand Final. As the lion’s share of the points went to 1st and 2nd spot from both SF1 and in the GF, Thursday’s scoreboard performances didn’t really tally with what happened on Saturday. Belgium (Because Of You) actually finished as the highest qualifier from SF2 in the Grand Final, with 127 jury points helping them to 7th place. Tenth place qualifier Estonia finished in 8th in the Grand Final - again the juries helping lift them into the top 10 with 146 points after only getting 22 audience points.
More curiously, Australia, who had a decent running order spot on Saturday saw their audience vote melt away. Having won SF2 they only received 21 audience points - their jury performance did keep them in the top 10 overall though. Austria had a similar story, with the audience deserting them on Saturday but they had the difficult task of opening the Grand Final too.
00:00 Semi Final 1
06:22 Semi Final 2