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.

As previously mentioned, I rank the songs that do not qualify for the final on the basis of the points they received in their semi-final and not how close they were to a possible final place.

For this reason, today we are talking about this year’s Latvian contribution, it was called “Aija” and was performed by the group Sudden Lights.

Not since 2016 has this country qualified for the finals, but this year they were just 4 points short of beating the 10th placed country in their semi-final, it must have been very sad for them to find out.

Perhaps especially considering the fact that our Latvian friends had no “neighbors” who could vote for them, while Serbia, who finished 10th, got a whopping 10 points from Croatia.

Well, if nothing else, they can boast that they were better liked by the rest-of-the-world voters than Loreen who won, they got 8 points from this “jury”, while our Swedish friend got 7 points.

The biggest problem for Andrejs, Kärlis, Zitmanis and Martins was probably simply that they were in the tough semi-final, if they had only drawn the other semi-final they would probably have got a place in the final I think now then.

We were served a rather nice visual show where they managed to create the mood of the song on stage and they managed to appear as a band and the dynamics you expect were certainly present.

It’s possible that the vocalist came off as a bit of an introvert, but it actually suited the song, it’s not exactly very extroverted, if you know what I mean.

Add good vocals and you realize that it was more coincidence that this country didn’t make it to the finals, let’s hope they come back next year with even more courage and a song that can finally make it to the finals, last time they came made it to the final, it was held in Sweden.

Featured image by CORINNE CUMMINGS – EBU