Morten Thomassen from Norway started reported on the final positions of the 37 entries in the 2023 Eurovision song contest. ESC Covers google translated it from Norwegian to English.

This is a blog entry and represents only writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.

There are always some countries that do much better than most people expect, our Estonian friend Alika was predicted to barely manage to qualify for the final and that from the “easy” semi-final 2, and damn it, the song “Bridges” actually came on 10 place in the semi-finals and in other words achieved exactly what the bookmakers had predicted.

Normally, this would have been given a position in the final fairly close to the bottom of the results list, but then the jury came and saved the whole thing by having this song in 5th place, just behind Finland in fact, with a whopping 146 points, so they didn’t do too impressive The 22 points she got from the people caused her to drop down to 8th place in the end.

Now it must be said that the 10th place in the semi-final was with a 30-point lead, so in that sense the final place was well deserved.

I would call this song plain and simple a good piece of ballad craft, by no means very unusual in any way, but with a very good vocalist to perform it, it still made enough of an impression, at least with the jury.

I have a feeling that the gentlemen and ladies in the jury fell a lot for a vocalist with steely control and a good ability to convey the song she performed and that obviously managed to cover up the fact that the song itself, as previously mentioned, might not be bothered by too much originality in any way.

The people seemed to have good vocals a bit further down their assessment list since it turned out that only 4 country residents thought this deserved points and 3 of these were neighboring countries, hooray for neighbours.

I myself like the fact that a very good and visually also fairly good performance gets such a good placement, sometimes even the simple ones are the best in our competition.

Our Estonian friends have mostly managed to qualify for the final in recent years and you would think that is the goal next year as well, but it would have been nice to have a song in Estonian soon then.

Featured image – Corinne Cumming – E B U