La lotteria dei rigori

Seems like my own country has kind of run out of luck... First we fail to qualify for the World Cup, then lose the right to host the relocated headquarters of the European Medicine Agency, post Brexit. If I were a cynic ex-pat, I'd probably think that the former will be felt like the worst defeat across Italy. May be it will.

As I've mentioned here, I'd been talking to Politico, about how the whole process looked like the Eurovision. I think the actual thing did have some elements $-$ earlier today, on the eve of the vote, it appeared like Bratislava was the hot favourite. This kind of reminded me of the days before the final of the Eurovision, when one of the acts is often touted as the sure-thing, often over and above its musical quality. And I do believe that there's an element of "letting people know that we're up for hosting the next one" going on to pimp up the experts' opinions. Although sometimes, as it turns out, the favourites are not so keen in reality $-$ cue their poor performance come the actual thing...

In the event, Bratislava was eliminated at the first round. The contest went all the way to extra times, with Copenhagen dropping out at the semifinals and Amsterdam-Milan contesting the final head-to-head. As the two finalists got the same number of votes (with I think one abstaining), the decision was made on luck $-$ basically on penalties, or as we say in Italian, la lotteria dei rigori.

I guess there must have been some thinking behind the set-up of the voting system that, in case it came down to a tie at the final round, both remaining candidates would be "acceptable" (if not to everybody, at least to the main players) and so they'd be happy for this to go 50:50. And so Amsterdam it is!