'We bowled well without reward' - Watling

Tuesday was New Zealand's toughest day on their West Indies tour so far, with the hosts moving into an 89-run lead at stumps with five wickets still in hand. BJ Watling, the New Zealand wicketkeeper, felt their bowlers had bowled well, "without a lot of reward".

"We beat the bat a lot, didn't quite find the edges today, and yeah, I mean that's Test cricket for you," Watling said. "They [West Indies] fought through the tough periods and cashed in."

"They played well to put us under pressure, but we kept coming, and I think you can look at the last spell from Trent [Boult] and Tim [Southee], still ran in hard and put Shiv [Chanderpaul] under a lot of pressure there. Yeah, we'll come back tomorrow and look to take five quick wickets and get out there and score some runs and put a target on the board."

The pitch at the Queen's Park Oval was slower than the one they had played on in the first Test in Kingston, Watling said, but there were signs that it could provide the spinners help later in the game.

"I thought Ish [Sodhi] bowled really well as well, landed the ball in some good areas," Watling said. "There was some turn out there today, but it's only day two so it'll only get better."

Trent Boult wasn't in the best of health, but he still bowled 17 overs over the course of the day, and was rewarded late in the final session with the wicket of Kraigg Brathwaite, one of West Indies' two centurions.

"Yes, [he had a] little bit of a fever, I think, but I don't know, he ran in there in the end and gave it his all, so it was good in the end to see our two spearheads running in at full tilt in the end," Watling said. "That [Brathwaite's wicket] was reward for Trent's hard work as well."

With two recognised batsmen still to come, in Jermaine Blackwood and Denesh Ramdin, New Zealand's work will be cut out on the third morning.

"We've got to keep doing the same things that we're doing, stay patient, and obviously try and get Shiv out early there," Watling said. "They've still got a couple of batters to come, so look, if we can get them out tomorrow reasonably early in that first session then we'll look forward to spending some time in the middle with the bat."

When their turn comes to bat again, New Zealand will want to do better than they did in the first innings, when they folded for 221, having been 192 for 4 at one stage. That total, Watling said, was a fair way short of a solid first-innings score.

"We probably weren't as disciplined as we'd have liked to be, we were definitely a hundred shy, a hundred and fifty shy on that wicket," he said. "We've talked about the conditions out there being different again to Kingston so we have to adapt and adjust and come back in the second innings and put a good total on the board."