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.

The thing about some countries being paid very well by one of the jury groups and rather poorly by another means that some countries actually end up further down than they should in a way and our Slovenian friends fell victim to this this year.

With the jury they came in 19th place and with the people 16th place, but in total it was still “only” 21st place, which was perhaps lower than what they themselves had thought it would be, although they beat Albania by only 2 points so it could have been worse.

“Carpe Diem” sang Bojan, Jure, Kris, Jan and Nace in the group Joker Out and they did it in Slovenian and proved that you don’t have to sing in English to be successful in ESC and that’s always a good thing to take with you .

They came in 5th place in their semi-final, so from that point of view it was perhaps a bit disappointing that they ended up so far down, but we have to remember that they came from semi-final 2 and the supposedly strongest songs were mostly collected in semi-final 1, however, in the final they got top scores from their neighbors Croatia and Serbia, so the neighbors are still very much alive in our beloved competition.

We were served colorful happy pop-rock from guys who had definitely taken a charm course and without a doubt passed that very course.

Vocally it’s within and they appear as a group with the dynamics such a group should have and in that sense there is really little to draw on what we see.

Possible use of Slovenian was a drag for some and the song they performed was possibly not the most exciting we’ve heard from this country, it was a pretty standard song from that type of music.

You could perhaps also have a slightly tighter show, it got a bit too loose at times, they were without a doubt very happy to perform on this stage this evening and you could see that they were having a great time.

This country hasn’t “bothered” us by qualifying for the finals far too many times, but according to the statistics of the last few years they will qualify for the finals next year before they get two years out of it, we’ll see if these statistics are to be trusted on then.

Featured image by Corinne Cumming –  EBU