Italy has won the 2014 Junior Eurovision Song Contest! The 12th edition of the competition for Europe’s young singers was held in Malta, with 16 countries competing for the title – and after a reasonably close voting, it was 14-year-old Vincenzo Cantiello who ultimately secured a comfortable victory with the power ballad “Tu primo grande amore”. Not a bad result considering it was Italy’s first ever appearance in Junior ESC!

Second place was taken by Bulgaria, one of the hotly-tipped favourites before the show, while third place was occupied by Armenia. Meanwhile, Croatia finished bottom of the pile with just 13 points, including the 12 automatically assigned to each song – making their “Game Over” statistically the least successful JESC song ever.

The show was the usual mix of hugely professional young singers and clearly more inexperienced performers, which is precisely what gives JESC its charm and makes it into such a well-loved event among our chatroom crowd and the Eurovision fan community in general – and, if nothing else, a fun way to spend a dark and gloomy November night!

The hashtag-infused motto of the contest was “#together” (as the theme/interval song repeatedly – repeatedly – reminded us), and we indeed had a big turnout in our chat watching the show and voting together. Our favourite was Cyprus, with an average score of 7.12 out of 10, followed by Serbia (7.00) and Bulgaria (6.73). The most polarising song was Croatia, which was loved and hated in equal measure and will undoubtedly establish itself as a new cult favourite in the years to come.

But let’s conclude by returning to the “right” end of the scoreboard. Here you can see the winning performance once again – congratulations Italy!