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.

Our Portuguese friend Mimicat was actually in the place behind Norway when the jury had their say, but the people were not very impressed by her performance, so with only 16 points from them, she ended up with a total of 59 points, which then indicates that the jury thought the song “Ai Coração” deserved 43 points.

The fact that the lady also got the hopeless starting number 2 in the final probably didn’t make matters any better, songs with exactly that starting number tend to disappear a little and quickly become a waiting song for the songs you look forward to seeing and hearing.

Apart from the fact that the Greek jury thought this was the second best song of the evening and the Moldovan one thought it was the third best, the scoring was rather poor and it is very possible that the popular nature of the song meant that these two juries liked it.

Now maybe the songs were more cabaret than folk and there has never been a style of music that has really made it big in our beloved competition.

Because what we were served was just as good a show as one should expect from this type of music, very fiery, very red and glowing in its own way, and unlike Norway, the dancers got to be an important part of the show, not background decorations.

Vocally, it holds up a lot and Marisa, as the lady’s real name is, manages to have a flirtatious style, so really not much to complain about what we got to see.

The problem was probably that this was not quite a song at the time and then it quickly goes like this on the results list, you mostly get stray points and you change much closer to last place than what the efforts on stage would indicate.

But, I never stop digging the fact that this country mostly sends quite unique tunes and sticks to something that sounds worthy of Portuguese and real, sometimes it does well on the charts and other times it gets a bit low points, I think I they live well with.

Featured image – Corinne Cumming – EBU