Eurovision 2012 prediction : Thursday's semi-final

Well, this one has been hurting my head. There are no fewer than five Balkan ballads that are all perfectly plausible qualifiers, but it's hard to believe that all of them will make it through. There's a school of thought that holds that because Slovenia and Croatia are next to each other in the running order, one of them is bound to 'kill' the other. But if so, it's not entirely clear which one it will be - Croatia is the stronger song, but Slovenia has the more eye-catching staging. There again, Slovenia is the only ex-Yugoslav country that hasn't discernibly benefited from the Balkan bloc vote over the years. Anyway, it may be my heart talking (given that I'm a fan of both songs), but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I expect both Croatia and Slovenia to just about sneak through. If at least one of the Balkan ballads is going to miss out, Bosnia and Herzegovina looks like marginally the most probable candidate.

The Georgian entry is atrocious, but I've pencilled it in as a qualifier, if for no other reason than it will stand out amongst all the ballad mush. So that leaves me with the following ten -

Turkey
Serbia
Sweden
Malta
Norway
Slovenia
Macedonia
Georgia
Ukraine
Croatia

You could just as easily make a case for having Estonia, Lithuania and the Netherlands on that list. It's certainly a much more unpredictable semi-final than Tuesday's, and should be really exciting. The quality will be a bit higher as well.

This is also the semi-final in which UK viewers can vote - although Serbia is my favourite, I think I'll be going with Croatia, as they'll probably be more in need of help.