Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 26th May 2011

The return of juries in the late 2000s as part of a new 50-50 voting system combining the votes of televoters and professional juries was generally viewed as a positive development by Ireland, espeically given our run of successes in the 1980s and especially the 1990s during the jury voting era and our abysmal run of results for most of the televoting era in the late 1990s and 2000s. This definitely proved to be the case in 2010 when jury votes were needed to ensure Niamh Kavanagh qualify for that year’s final but the advantage offered by jury voting proved to be less clear for Ireland in the 2011 contest. (more…)

Adrian Kavanagh, 26th May 2011

The EBU has just released jury vote and televote details for the recent Eurovision Song Contest final and two semi finals – almost a month earlier than the 2010 figures were released last year – which throw up some interesting findings as was the case for the 2010 figures. (more…)

Adrian Kavanagh, 17 May 2011

Ireland finished 8th in both the Final and the second Semi Final of Eurovision 2011, winning 119 points from 42 other voting countries (average of 2.8 points) in the Final and 68 points from 21 other voting countries in the semi final (average of 3.2 points) – the slightly higher average vote in the semi final can be explained by the fact that Ireland was competing with 18 other countries for votes in the semi final with the number of countries competing with Ireland for points in the final increasing by 33.3% to 24.  Ireland earned points from 17 different countries (and no points from 25 countries) in the Final, while Ireland earned points from 13 different countries (and no points from 8 countries) in the semi-final.  So who were the countries that were most generous in terms of awarding points to Ireland in this year’s contest? (more…)

Adrian Kavanagh, 16 May 2011

Eurovision televoting blocs

Despite our good result on Saturday night, there has again been some disgruntlement at the impact of what is perceived to be bloc voting, but actually amounts to a combination of geographical (or classic “friends and neighbours”) voting and diaspora voting. Analysis I did on televoting patterns by different Eurovision countries in past contests suggests the existence of different voting blocs that tend to especially favour certain countries in Eurovision contests and from which other bloc members will expect to poll their greatest number of votes by and large. These different blocs – Western European-Diaspora, Former Soviet-Orthodox, Former Yugoslav, Iberian and Nordic – are described in the above map.

So how did these blocs vote in this year’s contest? This post will briefly look at average votes won across different blocs for all the countries competing in last Saturday’s final. (more…)

Adrian Kavanagh, 16th May 2011

Congratulations to Jedward and their team on a great perfromance in Dusseldorf and a great result in taking 8th place for Ireland in the final (and also the semi final, proving earlier point that getting out of the semi final would be as difficult as doing well in the final!) They also won the Artistic Award (voted on by all commentators at the Eurovision) and were thankfully very sedate when they received it…NOT!

In the previous post, I suggested that Azerbaijan would win the contest if based on past voting history and voting patterns of the 43 countries (or rather 42 countries, as Italy could not be included due to returning to the contest this year after a 13 year absence) during the televoting era (1998-2010). Comparing the predicted results based on voting history with the actual results could give us a glimpse of what the actual results might have been once the bloc (or rather, geographical/diaspora) voting dimension was discounted. (more…)

Adrian Kavanagh, 13th May 2011

In terms of working out who may win this year’s Eurovision (and hopefully making a few bob in the process) various factors can be looked at, but the three most significant ones are the Eurovision betting odds, past voting histories involving the contestants and the countries voting in the contest, and draw position. (more…)

Adrian Kavanagh, 13th May 2011

There’s no use trying to argue that this is nothing other than a fairly lousy draw, given that acts draw to perform in the earlier stages of Eurovision finals generally tend to do worse than those on later – just as the ate draw worked for us in the semi final this earlier draw can’t help our Eurovision hopes. It is not as bad as the No. 2 draw of course, which fell to the luckless Dino Merlin of Bosnia who had already had to perform at the No. 1 position in Thursday’s semi final, or the No. 3 draw, which would seriously millitate against the Danish hopes. But the Irish draw position becomes worse when you consider that it is towards the start of an uptempo song road-block in the earlier part of the draw, stretching from the No.5 draw position to the No.10 draw position – there is a similar slower tempo/ballad road block in the later part of the draw stretching from the No.18 draw position effectively to the No.23 position (with Spain in No.22 breaking this sequence).