Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 28th March 2013

The running order for the two semi-finals for the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest was announced today and Ireland will perform in 13th position (out of 16 countries/acts) in the first of these semi-finals. Rather controversially, this was not done this year by means of a draw as in previous contests but was decided on by the show producers, although a draw was held in January to decide whether acts would be performing in the first half or the second half of the contest.

Figure 1: Average points by draw position in Eurovision semi-finals, 2004-2012

This is not as good a draw position as Jedward enjoyed in the semi-finals of 2011 and 2012, but as Figure 1 above shows it is still, on average, one of the better draw positions a country can hope to get in a Eurovision semi-final. The 13th draw position would rank as the fourth best draw position to get if based on the average number of points won by acts performing in that draw position across all semi-finals since 2004, as compared with the points averages for acts performing in other draw positions. Ryan Dolan will also be performing after a female ballad (in Romanian) from Moldova and before a female ballad (in Greek) from Cyprus, allowing his up-tempo dance song a better chance of standing out in this competition. But Ewan Spence on the ESC Insight website actually sees this aspect as a weakness, arguing that the jarring contrasts between the Moldovan, Irish and Cypriot entries means that he “wouldn’t rate Ireland at more than a 50/50 shot right now”.  Read the rest of this entry »