Like previous years, ESC COVERS will again share a blog post from Morten Thomassen of OGAE NORWAY with his views on the positions reached by all 35 2026 entries. ESC Covers google translated it from Norwegian to English.

It is said that you can’t make gold out of gray stone, but sometimes someone gets good attempts and in my opinion this year’s Polish entry “Pray” sung by the artist Alicja falls under this term. Alicja Maria Szemplinska, which is the lady’s full name, had a ticket to ESC-2020, but that ticket was, as is well known, unused due to a certain virus that found it too good to wreak havoc that year.

There was talk that she, like some other 2020 artists, would be allowed to try out in 2021, but nothing came of it and our Polish friend first had to try out in the Polish final in 2023 before the saying that third time is the best struck, but victory in this year’s Polish final saved her from having to pray to higher powers to participate in ESC for a long time.

Whether she prayed to higher powers for a superb staging of her stage show is unknown, but if she did, it can be clearly said that she probably got most of her wishes fulfilled, as here we saw one of the rare occasions where the stage show takes a fairly ordinary song to quite great heights.

I think the song itself is messy and pretty uninteresting, but when you have such outstanding vocals as Alicja has where she could simply ooze with fabulous vocals, you basically do a good part of the job just there.

I miss the big choir that is included in the song, but the miss is not so great when instead there are 4 dancers doing cool moves on a steep hill, it is a wonder that everyone managed to keep their balance at all times, this performance was almost religiously good.

The fact that it didn’t do better in the final, after all it came in 2nd place in semi-final 1, is probably because the audience who voted didn’t fall for it despite good vocals, in fact Jonas Lovv did it 2 points better than this song in the televoting and this was probably what we call a jury song that the “normal” music listener rarely falls for.

Right now, our Polish friends are more of a jury country than a telephone voting country, it hasn’t always been like that, so they have to try to find a song that can garner votes from both parts of the voting, then maybe they can get a top 10 placement soon, they last got that in 2016, so it’s about time.

Featured image – ESC Covers