It can’t be easy to be Eric Saade today. Since Sweden didn’t even qualify for the final last year there is now a lot of pressure on Eric Saade to turn Sweden’s luck around. Will this 20 year old boy be able to handle the pressure? Or will this be one more of Sweden’s failures?
After Wednesday’s semi final one thing is for sure, there are no way of predicting who will qualify for the final and who will not. There were a lot of surprises as several of the favorites didn’t go through to the final. Instead a few of the more anonymous songs charmed the viewers and sailed right through. How will this affect Sweden’s chances tonight? And how come so many of the favorite songs doesn’t go through? It might be an effect of that the professional jury groups determine half of the outcome. Their job is to vote from a professional point of view and maybe they are appealed by totally different things than the general viewers at home.
And how could this affect Sweden then? This year I guess you could say that the Swedish viewers chose a package with a cute guy, a nice catchy song and a well produced performance as oppose to just choosing a song. A well produced and cool performance might convince the viewers at home to vote, especially when it is a cute guy/girl singing. But as the juries is supposed to do a professional judgment of the song the production of the performance should have less impact on their votes. This can actually become a little bit of a problem for Sweden as there has been criticism about Eric’s singing and the corny lyrics of the song.
Another problem could be the technical difficulties with the Swedish performance. Since Eric has a glass cage on stage which he will have to break out of it’s very important that the glass breaks in the exact right time. If not, Eric could be trapped inside. There were no problems with the breaking of the glass before the rehearsal started, but during the rehearsal there have been several difficulties. However during the last dress rehearsal the technical problems with the glass seemed to be solved. But if the breaking of the glass part should fail anyway tonight it’s very likely that Sweden will lose a lot of votes because of that.
I really hope that Eric can handle the pressure on him tonight and do the performance as good as he did in Melodifestivalen and as good as he has been doing it during the rehearsals here in Düsseldorf. If he does that, I hope the Swedish viewers will be proud of him irrespective of if he qualifies or not. At the same time, as a Swede I know how much pressure we tend to put on our artists and athletics to be successful. This to the extent that I almost don’t dare to read the Swedish newspapers tomorrow if Sweden doesn’t qualify. My wish is just that if Sweden doesn’t qualify tonight that we can learn something from it and do things differently next year.
Eric certainly is popular among the Eurovision Song Contest fans here in Düsseldorf, and I hope he will be in the rest of Europe to tonight!
