This article forms part of the OnEurope archive and was originally published on oneurope.co.uk. It has been permanently migrated to oneurope.net, the official home of OnEurope.
Well this is embarrassing. I’ve seen a grand total of two rehearsal runthroughs in total from this semi, and time seems to have slipped away from me this year. This was published on Thursday 24 May 2012, the day of the second semi-final at Baku Crystal Hall in Baku, Azerbaijan, with the live show due to begin at 21:00 CEST. The jury show and final dress rehearsal had already happened on 23 May, with another dress rehearsal scheduled for the afternoon of the show.
So, in this utter carnage of an 18-country semi, I shall abandon all attempts at nuanced analysis of considerations like the draw, the acts, and the songs, and predict our 10 qualifiers to be those who Always Qualify Because They All Just Vote For Each Other You Know. That would be:
- Serbia
- Ukraine
- Sweden
- Georgia
- Turkey
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
Oh, that leaves some gaps. Alright, that’s probably left room to add:
- FYR Macedonia
- Slovenia
- Estonia
- Norway
There, that was easy enough. It may be H.I.Lariously wrong, but at least it’s H.I.Lariously wrong at a decent rate of knots.
How wrong was it?
In the event, this was not quite the disaster forecast by the tone. Eight of the ten guesses qualified: Serbia, Ukraine, Sweden, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia, Estonia and Norway. Georgia finished 14th and Slovenia 17th, while the two qualifiers omitted from this hurried list were Lithuania, which finished third, and Malta, which finished seventh.
The strongest calls were Sweden and Serbia: they finished first and second in the semi-final, scoring 181 and 159 points respectively. Ukraine qualified in eighth place with 64 points, while Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina finished fifth and sixth. The full qualifying order was Sweden, Serbia, Lithuania, Estonia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malta, Ukraine, FYR Macedonia and Norway.
For anyone wondering whether the rehearsal viewing had secretly supplied more information than admitted, the running order placed Serbia first, Ukraine seventh, Slovenia ninth, Sweden 11th, Georgia 12th, Turkey 13th, Estonia 14th, Norway 16th, and Bosnia and Herzegovina 17th; FYR Macedonia was second. And as for the line about everyone voting for each other: that remains a joke about the contemporary Eurovision cliché, not an explanation of the scoreboard.
