An apparently sweeping victory was, in truth, more of a grind for Ken Doherty in the quarterfinals of the Benson and Hedges Masters at Wembley Conference Centre yesterday. But his 6-1 win over James Wattana guaranteed the Dubliner a minimum cheque of £37,000 - easily his biggest of the season so far.

In this, his seventh appearance in the event, Doherty has matched his performance of last year, by reaching the last four. But he was more concerned about rebuilding confidence which has taken a severe dent since his marvellous World Championship triumph at The Crucible last May.

"I've obviously put pressure on myself without being aware of it," he said afterwards. "And it has nothing to do with my move back to Dublin. That's the best thing that ever happened to me. I've never been happier in myself."

He went on: "It's time to stop trying to live up to the idea of being world champion and return to being Ken Doherty again. And to do that, I need to achieve greater consistency. If I can succeed in raising the general level of my performances, winning tournaments is simply going to happen."

But it hasn't all been doom and gloom since Sheffield. In fact Doherty beat John Higgins to win an invitation tournament in Malta in November and went on to reach the semi-finals of the German Open a month later. But these efforts hardly reflected his elevated status in the game.

Small wonder Wattana was somewhat bemused about yesterday's result. "Ken just played normal: it's a funny game," he said afterwards.

Wattana was referring to a modest highest-break of 65 by Doherty, who had only one other that was higher than 50. A crucial difference between the players, however, was the instinctive, competitive skills of the world champion. At the end of a scrappy period of play, it was almost invariably Doherty who snatched the crucial points.

For instance, the Dubliner punished a missed easy red by Wattana to make a winning clearance of 53 in the first. And Doherty also won the second after laying a snooker on the last red. But a tight match seemed likely when the Thai won a scrappy third frame by taking the last three colours.

Then a break of 39 was sufficient to set up the fourth frame for Doherty, giving him a 3-1 lead at the mid-session interval. After that, Wattana's desperate attempts at getting back into the match effectively smothered his chance of a revival.

Meanwhile, Doherty was enjoying more than his share of luck. There was a fluked snooker on the last red in the fifth and an equally fortuitous pot into a corner pocket from a double, when safety was the objective. Even a winning clearance here included a blue which wriggled between the jaws of a centre pocket before dropping.

There was an even more outrageous fluke in the sixth, in which a red bobbled in a corner and stayed out before finding its way into a centre pocket. If one accepts that competitors make their own luck, Doherty was clearly working overtime to get points on the board by every possible route.

Eventually, a predictable outcame became surprisingly comfortable when a break of 65 tied up the match in the seventh. Ironically, Doherty was unfortunate that it wasn't higher, as a perfectly good pot on the blue culminated in the white going in-off the pink.

"This is one of the biggest tournaments on the calendar, so I have to be pleased with the result," he added. But unknown to him, the match was watched on television elsewhere in the arena by Stephen Hendry, who beat Nigel Bond in his quarter-final last night.

Hendry's 6-3 win has thus produced a 16th meeting between the pair in the semi-finals today. Clearly, the most notable of these was Doherty's 18-12 win in the final of the World Championship, but since then, the Scot has beaten him twice in the European League.