Amber gave a good performance in the semi finals of the Eurovision Song Contest on Thursday night. She sang well, her voice was true and she had a good stage presence. After the dressed rehearsals, Amber and the Malta team were given good feedback. But the bookmakers put her outside the top 12 places in each heat which would have seen her through to the final.

The bookies are almost always right and this was no exception. Amber failed to qualify and all the hype and sensationalism died overnight. In fact, yesterday morning’s news bulletins made scant mentions of the news.

But then the ramifications began. V18 chairman Jason Micallef took to Facebook to attack PBS CEO Anton Attard for the failure to qualify, laying the blame squarely on him. But the truth of the matter is that the televoting European public just didn’t like the song enough. Malta was also placed in an unfortunate pool where there were a number of Nordic countries, which meant that ‘vote for your neighbour’ came into the mix.

Malta always suffers when this comes into play because we have no European neighbours to speak of, apart from Italy. But our musical styles are very different, and the fact that our singers normally go for an English song doesn’t help in that respect either.

The truth of the matter is that unless we have a truly great, catchy song performed by a stunning artist, we are not going to win this contest on merit alone. Maltese singers who placed well in the contest had all of the above or a mixture of the above, but even then, it was not good enough to win.

We always build this contest up into a storm of anticipation and when we do not get the result we hoped for, we tend to sit in the corner and sulk and play the blame game. Perhaps it is time to treat the contest as we should – as a bit of pure and unabashed fun. Maybe we should go for something different next time, something that could be given a big dose of fun by personalities such as Joe Demicoli, Pawlu Borg Bonnaci, Ganni or even a spin on an Ghana song.

We seem to have tried to hard for too long so perhaps it is just time to take the Mickey for a while. We should continue to participate and we should try and give our struggling artists a chance to shine on such a large stage. But we also need to just stop taking things so seriously. And after all that, the final will be held today. Will it be a hit song that wins? Or will it be something a bit more silly. After all, if the Finish monster rock group Lord won it in 2006 with Hard Rock Alleluia, then anyone has a chance.