Eurovision 2021 This Weekend

This Saturday is one of the best Saturday's on the calendar because love it or hate it, the evening's television will be dominated by the Eurovision Song Contest and by midnight we will know which country are the top songsters and can expect hordes of brightly coloured Eurovision fans piling into their nation next year, virus permitting, as they earn the honour of hosting it.
As the contest now includes Australia along with Israel, it is becoming more of an international affair and after hearing all the songs i am putting my little ticks beside Italy's guitar bash, Malta's quirky effort, Iceland's 80's synth attempt, the Greek's annoyingly catchy song, Lithuania's tune which again harks back to 80s synthesizers and dark horse Germany with a mad song which will either do well and fly or sink without a trace, something i feel about the Italian song also, i like it but it may be too aggressive for your normal Eurovision audience.
The bookies have the winner as Italy (5/2) with France (11/4) second and then Malta (5/1), Iceland 8/1), Cyprus (10/1) and Switzerland (11/1) making up the top six.
The UK is currently ranked 17th at 125/1 and likely to finish on the right hand side of the results board so we shouldn't worry about clearing the diary of the O2 complex next May because we won't be walking away with the prize.
So if you want to stick your money on someone the bookies are saying Italy and to be fair it is a very good guitar led song but luckily we have a fool-safe system that has an impressive record of picking the winners of elections so let's ask Google who will be holding aloft the Eurovision crystal microphone and asked to sing their song again on Saturday night.
Using online searches, and with a record of 9 correct predictions over the last 16 years where the top-searched candidate also received the most points from televoting, it has a prediction rate based on search activity of just over half right.
The powers that be at Google HQ have crunched the search data and come up with a list of winners based on the countries and acts that have been searched for the most by people in participating Eurovision countries online and they have Iceland winning the whole thing with Malta the runner up and then Lithuania, Germany, Austria and then the Netherlands but how the Netherlands got any searches is beyond me, to be polite, it's not a classic.
The Eurovision website has a poll and that has Eurovision fans voting France top and then Malta, Switzerland, Italy, Lithuania and Greece taking the top six spots and they are the people who are likely to be voting.
So taking all four sources into account, and bearing in mind that some may fall by the wayside at the semi Final stage, the smart money is going on Malta then Italy, Iceland and Lithuania and then a dust up between France, Switzerland, Germany and Greece for the fifth place but we may have to come back and revise it on Thursday after we the second Semi-Final.