IT is hard to imagine what thoughts could have been going through Tom Daley's head as he looked down from the high board in the seconds before his second dive of last night's 10m platform competition at the Royal Commonwealth Pool.

The reigning champion had opened his programme with a superb routine, but this was the big one. This was the demon dive.

A few seconds later he emerged from the pool to see a line of satisfying numbers across the scoreboard. They added up to 64.80 - nothing spectacular by his standards, but plenty good enough for the dive that has tormented him for the past two years. Daley can complete a back two-and-a-half somersault with two-and-a-half twists faster than he can say it, but it been a source of trauma for him since he messed it up at the London Olympics in 2012.

That it still troubled him had been clear enough from the morning's preliminary round, when he hit the water with an almighty splash and scored just 37.80. But when he nailed it in the final it gave him a massive confidence boost, and he pulled away from the field. From that point on, gold was a virtual certainty for the 20-year-old Englishman.

It helped that Australia's Matthew Mitcham, the 2008 Olympic champion and Daley's regular nemesis, put up only modest competition, virtually blowing his chances of a medal with some weak early dives. When Daley mounted the platform for his sixth and last dive, he had already scored enough points to take bronze.

His fifth dive had brought him 102.80 points, the single highest score of the evening. His last effort added another 93.50, and he won by a margin of 83 points from second-placed Ooi Tze Liang of Malaysia, with Canada's Vincent Riendeau in third place.

"I was really chuffed," he smiled afterwards. "It's nice to go into the last round knowing that you don't even have to do it to get a medal. It has been a long season, very tiring for all the athletes, and it was about who could hold it together in their heads and keep going."

Of the so-called demon dive, he added: "It could have been a lot better because I was a bit slow with my hands, but all my other dives are coming together and I'm happy to have something to show for all of it.

"I went back and talked to Jane [Figueiredo, his coach] and she said I just had to give it my all. For me, it was about trying to cancel out all I had been doing in the last week and get back to what it was like before that. It was all good, all there, I just didn't quite get my hands right. I'm pretty happy with the way it went."

While Daley celebrated his second successive gold in the event, he might just have been casting glances over his shoulder as well. In sixth place was James Denny, his partner in the synchronised 10m competition, while 14-year-old Matthew Dixon, the latest in the sport's long line of prodigies, performed superbly to claim ninth.

"British diving is the strongest it has ever been," said Daley. "England have topped the diving at the Commonwealth Games, and I don't think that has ever happened before. There's a lot more to come from British diving. This is just the beginning. Hopefully the legacy of London 2012 and Glasgow 2014 will come through. Hopefully we will be the unstoppable nation [at the Commonwealth Games] in Australia in 2018. Matthew is amazing and certainly one to watch out for."

Grace Reid should figure on a few radar screens as well. The 18-year-old from Edinburgh finished ninth in the women's 3m springboard competition, but she intends to delay her entry into university and concentrate on diving for the next 12 months.

"I'm really happy," said Reid. "Myself and my coach were super chuffed with that. We wanted more experience. The past four years I have been up and down with bad performances and my confidence was really low, but I have come out here and enjoyed every dive.

"The crowd helped me. They lift you up and you forget about anything else. They actually calmed me down. I expected them to make me nervous and jumpy but they calmed me down."

The gold in Reid's event was taken by Esther Qin of Australia. Canada's Jennifer Abel, who won the 1m springboard competition on Friday, was second, with England's Hannah Starling taking the bronze.