Brendan Dolan achieved one of the best tournament results of his career this week, as he reached the semi-final of the Players’ Championship Finals.

The Belcoo thrower dispatched the world number-one Gerwyn Price in the last 16, and then overcame the tournament’s top seed, Jose de Sousa, in the quarter-final before eventually bowing out to Ryan Searle in the last four.

Brendan’s performance is a confidence booster ahead of the World Championships later this month, but he felt there was still room for improvement despite the impressive run of results.

“I will take the positives out of the weekend,” he said.

“I know I wasn’t at my very best, but I had a wee bit of luck here and there, and I was able to take advantage of other people’s bad luck and get to the TV semi-finals.

“I have played well before and not got anywhere. I have won a tournament on the floor this year, and have been in the quarter final of a European tour event, but for TV tournaments it normally seems to be the first or second round for me.

“It is a major boost to know that I got over the line in these games, did the right thing at the right time, and didn’t buckle.”

Dolan started his campaign against Chas Barstow.

Despite being ranked just outside the top 100, Barstow had claimed the scalp of Dolan earlier in the year, but on this occasion the Fermanagh man eased into an early lead and emerged unscathed to set up a match against Ritchie Edhouse.

Edhouse managed one more leg than Barstow, with Dolan clinching victory by six legs to three.

That victory earned him a rematch of last season’s World Championship encounter with Gerwyn Price, with Dolan looking to avenge that last-gasp defeat that enabled Gerwyn to go on and clinch the world title.

“It was a game of missed doubles,” Dolan reflected.

“Gerwyn missed a lot more than I did, and as the game went on I kept strong on my own throw. I had broken him earlier in the game and that was the difference in the end.

“I did feel a lot more confident than normal and, once the game was on, it was about doing the right things at the right moment. It wasn’t about blasting him away, because I wasn’t playing well enough for that.

“Earlier that day against Richie, I knew my scoring wasn’t good enough, and again against Gerwyn I felt I missed a few doubles here and there, but I suppose I got a bit more confidence from him missing, and I held onto my throw.”

Next up was tournament number-one seed Jose de Sousa, and he was comfortably dispatched 10-4 before Brendan’s run came to an end against Ryan Searle.

“I felt that the semi-final was the first time the whole weekend I started to get my scoring from the word go, but I missed three or four darts at a double in the first leg, and that set the stall out,” he said.

“The atmosphere, and playing in the semi-final, and the possibility of maybe winning a major TV final, all those things probably added a wee bit of pressure, and that is probably why my doubles let me down a bit, although I thought my scoring was excellent.

“If I can get the consistency of the doubles and the scoring together in one match, I will be hard to beat.”

Brendan’s next test of his recent good form will be the World Championships at Alexandra Palace, where he has been drawn against the winner of the preliminary match between Callan Rydz and Yuki Yamada.

If he prevails in that match, he is likely to meet number-ten seed, Nathan Aspinall.