Coach Phil Simmons was happy with the way West Indies didn't allow England to run away with the game despite two sessions of hard toil and not many rewards on Day 4 of the first Test in Southampton.
The visitors finally reaped those for their patience and consistency in the final session, when they picked up five wickets to restrict England to 284/8, 170 ahead in the third innings with only two more wickets left in the bank by stumps.
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Even though a difficult fifth-day chase awaits the visitors, Simmons lauded the impressive effort made by them so far.
"It showed the persistence of the bowlers. We'd been fighting all day and Stokes and Zak started to take the bowling apart. But the persistence of Jason was rewarded and then Alzarri's spell was a huge spell too," Simmons told reporters.
"I'm extremely pleased with the way the bowlers bowled today - both when two batters Rory Burns and Dom Sibley batted before lunch and more so when Stokes and Crawley were trying to take it away from us."
"The patience we exhibited has been something that we've been asking for a while, and today it showed up. We bore the fruit of that in the evening session. You can't really say much more - they stuck to their tasks," he added.
England began the day 99 runs behind West Indies, who had taken a first-innings lead of 114 runs after being bowled out for 318 in response to hosts' 204.
Rory Burns (42) and Dom Sibley (50) got their team off to a slow but solid start, before Zak Crawley (76) played the most fluent innings of the day and along with stand-in skipper Ben Stokes (46) took England to the ascendency.
However, just then the Englishmen were held back in their quest to dominate the rest of the proceedings via a mini-collapse that saw them go from 249/4 to 284/8 by the end of the play.
With Mark Wood (1*) and Jofra Archer (5*) in and James Anderson to follow, England will hope that its lower-order can add some more useful runs in the morning on Day 5.
Kemar Roach (0/50), as in the first innings, went unrewarded on Day 4 also. But Shannon Gabriel (3/62) bagged three wickets, with Roston Chase (2/71), Alzarri Joseph (2/40) and Jason Holder (1/43) also contributing.
(Inputs from ESPNcricinfo)
