ESC 2020 - The Aftermath

2020 in general was a chaotic year with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, it affected our lives in many ways, one of those being the cancellation of Eurovision. In this post, I will discuss who I thought would do well, and who I thought would not do well, and also show you our individual scores for the semi finals. Full reactions to the songs can be found in the respective posts previously posted. 

                                                      

Semi Final One was a real mixed bag, and the one I found harder to predict. There are seven that I think would have definitely qualified, which were Sweden, Lithuania, Russia, Belgium, Malta, Norway & Ukraine. The rest I spent a lot of time scratching my head over, and I think possibly Cyprus, Azerbaijan & Romania sneaking though, but that was dependant on stage performance. I think the issue is you had several really attention grabbing songs (particularly in the first half) and a weaker second half, finished off with Ukraine, who I think would have been a televote grabber with "Solovey". For sure though, the televote winners would have either been Russia or Lithuania. Jury winners would have been Belgium & Norway. Its such a shame we will never know, I know even today, four years after the contest there is still fervent discussion over the results. Maybe in an alternate time frame the contest went ahead and we discovered who won. Anyway, here is the results from Semi Final one of our votes.

I know with only two of us voting, there's never going to be much difference in score for each country, but as you can see, the top 6 countries were all within two points of each other. And if these results had been the case, it would have been the first ever non-qualifier for Australia.

And here's our individual votes, as you can see our top threes are completely different, but there is some harmony in the rest of the results. As you can see, we share very different tastes in music!

Semi final two was easier to predict. I've got Greece, Austria, Serbia, Poland, Iceland, Switzerland, Denmark & Bulgaria qualifying, with San Marino & Albania sneaking in (Again, dependant on the stage performance). This semi final felt much more spread out and less forward ended like the first semi final. I think seeing the amount of discussion and love over Iceland's entry from even non-Eurovision fans, it's safe to say it would have been a televote winner. Juries tend to love high end emotional ballads like Poland & Switzerland, but I also think the jury would have liked Austria more than the televote. 

As you can see here, our votes differ significantly. Fan favourites Iceland would have not qualified, and underrated entries like Georgia, Czechia and Estonia would have creeped though. You can however see a cohesive scoring in the top 2. And yes, it pains me to say it, but I don't think Latvia would have qualified. I think it was just too out there, although I loved it! 

And here's the breakdown from our scores. You can see again the differences in our votes, although Poland, Austria and Switzerland are more in common.

And we get to the final. We of course had a draw in our winner, with Poland and Serbia both getting twelve points from one, and not from the other. I think we would have seen a fight between Lithuania, Russia & Italy for the win in the grand final. I think the Juries would have voted and given Italy a strong lead with quite a gap between them and the runner up of the Jury vote, which I think would possibly be Norway. I think Lithuania, Russia & Iceland would have been sat around 7th -10th position, and would have scooped up the majority of the televote scores. It would have been just a few votes between the winner and the runner up at the end, although I can't speculate on how much. But I have a feeling, this would have been one of the closest contests in recent years.

But I guess we will never know! 

Thank you so much for reading, and I look forward to what the 2021 contest will be like!