charlesf said:
FallenAngelII said:
How would it not be unfair for Lena to get to perform both as the opening act and to enter the contest as a guaranteed entrant in the final? And how is it comparable to seeding?!
Consider it part of the prize of winning. It's like the host nation of the world cup being automatically qualified and seeded.
If Europe then says, well, we liked the first song she sang better than her 2011 entry, then that'll negatively impact on her votes. So it cuts both ways.
And, most people seem to think it'll rather hurt than help her chances in 2011 that she won previously. I doubt that is the case though.
Did you, you know,
read my entry before replying to it? It would not be comparable to seeding at all! Seeing as how you clearly
didn't or were unable to understand what you read, you leave me no choice but to elaborate eloquently as to leave no room for future misunderstandings on your part:
Seeding is when you give someone a favourable position because they performed well in the past, thus you pair them up with the lowest seeded ("worst") teams so that you don't have the really good teams knocking each other out in the early rounds, ending up with a final where one team creams the other.
The point of seeding isn't merely to give the previous winner an advantage but also to make the contest more fair. The 2nd best team should never have to lose to the best team in the first round due to catastrophic seeding because that would make for a really bad and boring tournament. The point of seeding isn't necessarily to give the previous winner an advantage (because you seed
everyone, not just the winner) but to make tournaments
fair and balanced.
If one were to do the equivalent to seeding in the Eurovision Song Contest, one would simply give the best placed entry(/-ies) from the previous year the option of picking which position they would like to perform at in the (semi-)final. As a previous winner, Lena would get first pick (she'd probably pick spot #25 (or #24 depending on whether or not Turkey gets automatic qualification to the final in Germany's place).
That is comparable to seeding in sports.
But it's not entirely compatible with the Eurovision Song Contest. In Competitive sports, you generally keep the same players around if they won the last world cup since they were really, really good. You train them to keep them in shape and maybe even better shape than last year, thus, you will enter next year's tournament with a team just as good or better (generally speaking). In Eurovision, that can
never be the case since you may keep the same artist but never the same song (unless you self-plagiarize, but I think that's against the rules). Lena would be competing with an entirely different song.
To allow Lena to open the final with a rendition of "Satellite" lets her perform twice on the Eurovision stage in the final. It gives her more exposure, more screen-time, more time to show Europe her talents as a performer.
A suitable analogy would be to allow last year's winning soccer team the chance of scoring 5 goals before each match. Before each match, the team gets 5 shots at the goal (with or without a goalie) simply because they won last time and thus we should give them a
really, really unfair advantage.
So, no, letting her perform twice on final night is
not the same thing as seeding at all!
(Your ridiculous point of "Well, if Europe like 'Satellite' more than her 2011 entry, it might be a disadvantage for her" is easily refuted by "Well, what if they like her 2011 entry more than her 2010 entry, yet they like 5 other entries more than her, but her unfair advantage make her stick in their minds more, thus they end up voting for her more than they would have had she only gotten to perform once")
).
