We’ve already announced our top 10 from the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2018, but what did we think of the 16 other competing countries?* Who was at the bottom of a rankings?
Compared to the final results, we were about 50/50 with the final results. None of our top three featured in the real top three: the closest was winner Israel who we ranked at 5. Estonia, our number two, ended up coming eighth. We were WAY off when it came to Mikolas Josef from the Czech Republic: we really didn’t like his performance and Europe really did, coming in at 6th.
However, half of our top 10 (Israel, Cyprus, Italy, Estonia, Moldova) matched the real top 10 which is a fairly impressive alignment.
We were a little kinder to Australia at 9th, compared to the actual 20th, but we were a lot kinder to MÉLOVIN from Ukraine who we placed third but only came in 17th. On the (almost) flip-side, our 17th place was Germany who really came in from behind and placed 4th in the real vote.
Moldova was our only exact match with the real vote: we both placed them just within our top 10.
Overall, given the general erraticism of the combined jury and televote, the extent to which we were both pretty well-aligned is, as jury member Paul notes, fairly remarkable given the diverse tastes both within our jury and, of course, across Europe. It is also notable given the way we formulated our ranking, the details of which are at the bottom of this article.
Full jury ranking breakdown
This is the full ranking of each entry by juror going into the grand final broadcast. The jury members may be found below the breakdown.
Jury Member A: Brittany
Jury Member B: Logan
Jury Member C: Paul
Jury Member D: Kylie
Jury Member E: Robyn
Jury Member F: Cadin
Jury Member G: John
Jury Member H: Josh
For a reintroduction to our jury, check out our announcement post.
*An important note: these were our grand final rankings going into the grand final and were based on each respective artist’s semi-final performance or, in the case of the automatic qualifiers, their jury show performance. The reasons for this are purely logistical and circumstantial but this caveat is key to understanding our rank for the most obvious reason that a good semi-final performance may not have translated into a good grand final performance. For the most part, however, these rankings were decided on by our jury as a grand final rank so each performance’s place is such that it was decided on holistically and light of the grand final line-up. In future years, we may revise our approach to actually score and rank the performances of the grand final. For more about our jury mechanism, check out our introduction post.
