A previous draw allocated the 34 semi-finalists into two semi-finals and placed in which one of them the five finalists will be voting. Today a new draw took place in Oslo. It was time to find out in which order the semi-finalists will be competing on the 25th and 27th of May and which starting position the five finalists will have for the final.
The starting position in the semi-finals is of quite high importance to most of the participating countries. Some believe that the later you start the better your chances are of qualifying as the TV viewers remember the later ones a lot better. Others however believe that an early starting position isn’t that bad if you have a strong enough song the later ones will struggle to live up to. One thing most prefer though is that their song doesn’t end up right between songs of the same genre. With so many ballads this year that the contest jokingly has been named "The Eurovision Ballad Contest" this can however be quite difficult to ensure.
At the allocation draw that took place on the 7th of February it was also drawn which countries would be starting early and who would be starting late in their semi-final, but as there is quite a difference between starting first or second up to starting eight the focus was also high on today’s draw that was shown live on TV in Ireland, Greece and hosting country Norway as well as via webstream.
Wildcards:
Before the draw started today four countries were given a so-called wildcard making them able to pick their starting position themselves in accordance to if they were an early or late starter in their semi-final. This year Serbia, Belarus, Switzerland and Bulgaria were the lucky ones with this oppertunity. Furthermore one of the five finalists were also given a wildcard to pick their position for the Eurovision Song Contest final.
Running order – Semi-finals:
Below you’ll see two screenshots showing the complete running order for the two semi-finals of the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest. In each of the two semi-finals the participating countries themselves will be voting plus the automatically qualified finalists who were picked for that particular semi-final. Germany and Spain will be voting in the first one while United Kingdom, France and host country Norway will be voting in the second semi-final that takes place two days later.
We would like to make aware of that the spelling of the Former Yugoslavian Republic Of Macedonia isn’t a mistake from us. On TV it was presented as FYA Macedonia. That as well as the missing flag for Georgia is technical problems which will probably be solved before the actual Eurovision Song Contest starts.
Running order – Final: Five countries won’t have to go through a semi-final in order to qualify for the final. As usual these are the big4; United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain plus the host country. 20 more countries will participate in the final; ten from each semi-final, making it a total of 25 countries at the end competing to win the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest.
As the show ended the voting order for the final appeared on TV. This can be seen below. This draw was performed Saturday, but hasn’t been made public before now.
