Semi-Final 1: The Qualifiers

Now that the reports from the jury semi-final is in I have pretty much as much information as I'm going to get so it prediction time. As promised I have the ten songs which I believe will qualify to the final but unlike most bloggers and press I also will list them in order of where I think they will place.

These predictions were arrived at by aggregating [fancy word for adding, makes me look really intelligent] my predictions for the juries top 10 and the public top 10. There are problems that can arise by doing this but overall I'm happy with these ten. So here we go, in order of their predicted placing in the final the Top 10 are:

1. Denmark

2. Iceland

3. Russia

4. Romania

5. Albania

6. Greece

7. Moldova

8. Ireland

9. Israel

10. Belgium

Just missing out

11. Cyprus

Obviously these are no more correct than anyone else's guess but it is my best guess.

Other Info: 

Jury Vote Winner: Albania

Public Vote Winner: Russia

Amount of money I'm willing to bet on these 10 qualifying: €0

A Pretty Good Draw For Ireland

Today the semi-final draw took place in Baku. In my view this draw is not overly important in the grand scheme of things. Therefore I won't go on and on. You can see the results here.

Overall this has been a relatively good draw for Ireland. We are in the second half of the smaller semi. However we are missing some of our key supporters such as UK, Sweden, Norway, Malta. On the other hand we do have countries such as Switzerland, Austria, Latvia and The Netherlands on our side.

In semi-final 1 Romania, Russia, Denmark, Greece and to a lesser extent Israel, would all have very good prospects of reaching the Final. However it is notable that while many countries have some of their closest neighbours in with them as you look at the draw for longer you see that there will be quite a lot of points floating around without any real place to go.

In semi-final 2 There are quite a lot of countries with a history of qualifying and I think this could like last year's intense first semi-final. The high number of Balkan countries could lead to some very interesting results and I think that despite what people think by the time jury votes are taken into account we will see very surprising results from semi 2. Ukraine, Sweden, Turkey and Georgia should comfortably make it over the line.

Quick News Reaction

A lot of news has reached our desk over the last two days so I am going to quickly run through it.

• France will present their song on Sunday January 29th i.e. this Sunday. The song is understood to be called Echo. It will be presented on a show at 16:00 CET (15:00 GMT). I hope to be around for it and look forward to it. 
• Portugal have announced their composers and singers for Festival Da Cancao (sorry for English keyboard settings). You can see these here.
• Croatia will present their song on 18th February. Due to the busy nature of that day (Italy is expected to present their Eurovision and Latvia hold the Eirodziesma final). We sincerely hope she gets it done early in the day.
• Ukraine have changed their national final date to 18th February. If that's all they change this year it will be a shock. 
• On behalf of The Best Eurovision Blog, I would like to say I am sorry for the mistakes in our reviews of the Hungarian national final the post has been removed and I will post a new one containing all of the songs tonight/tomorrow morning.
• The Semi-Final Allocation Draw will be held tomorrow (afternoon) I will keep you posted about it. Make sure you are following on Twitter @besteuroblog and on the blog. 
• Cyprus will hold their national final tomorrow (Wednesday) at 20:00 CET [I think]. Read our review of the Cypriot national final here.