Pakistan's opportunities to win both matches in this series illustrate the fascination of Test cricket but were false hopes. Test cricket is an examination of skill way beyond the Twenty20 variety. A win in this series would have been even more remarkable than the events in England, and Pakistan fans should reserve their judgment.

The fundamental problem for Pakistan's players is their lack of international cricket, and in particular Test cricket, over the last 18 months. There is no substitute for match practice and Pakistan's cricketers have suffered. Add to this an inadequate domestic structure and you have the recipe for the kind of failures that Younis Khan's team has just experienced.

Clearly, there are areas for improvement, and they are the same ones that have been discussed for a decade. An unsure and unsettled opening partnership. A middle order that fires sporadically but rarely when it matters. And a collective psychology and spirit that can turn victory into defeat rather than the other way round.

Younis will work on these areas. He will be bitterly hurt by these defeats and the failures of his senior colleagues, players he should be able to rely upon. Yet he is right to say that his team deserves time. Failures of technique and temperament can be masked in a Twenty20 sprint but Test cricket exposes the slightest weakness.

Pakistan's plan in Test cricket has to be set over the next two to three years. It will require that amount of time to build a team that consistently challenges in Test cricket. What's more, success in Test cricket cannot be achieved without a proper coach and management to support Younis and that requires the PCB to get its house in order.

Yet Pakistan should take away some positives. Mohammad Aamir impressed in the first Test, and can become a bowling hero. Fawad Alam was finally awarded an opportunity and it says something about his mindset that he scored a debut century in a crisis situation.

Pakistan could have been crushed in this series. In the end, both wins proved comfortable for Sri Lanka but Pakistan did compete enough to suggest better days ahead. The fact that they might have won both matches was the biggest surprise of all.

Pakistan have simply rediscovered how tough the challenge of Test cricket truly is.

I'm not sure I've ever recovered. Whenever Pakistan bat in the final innings of a Test match, whether to win or save the match, I expect the worst and desperately look for signs that any success is a turning point.

Younis Khan's team can't have found it easy to switch from the glamour of the Twenty20 World Cup to a gruelling Test series in Sri Lanka. But against all expectations they found themselves in a match-winning position. It was a position that they should have turned comfortably to victory.

Younis bemoaned a lack of steel and application among his senior players, echoes of his early complaints in the Twenty20 World Cup. He has a point. Pakistan's senior batsmen have historically struggled to summon sufficient mental fortitude to finish off a golden opportunity like the one presented to them at Galle.

This is why Javed Miandad and Inzamam-ul Haq - and to some degree Imran Khan - were such special batsmen for Pakistan. They were able to weigh anchor and force their less stable fellows to cling on to them. It is an attribute that Younis aspires to but hasn't consistently mastered. Shoaib Malik is even less familiar with such heroics.

But Pakistan's biggest worry is that this skill has almost entirely escaped their heaviest run scorer. Mohammad Yousuf has continued almost exactly where he left off, with a fairytale first-innings hundred and a disappointment when it really mattered.

Don't get me wrong, Yousuf's return is a welcome triumph but Pakistan need him to play the decisive innings. These innings are hard to quantify but they are the ones that make the difference between success and failure. They mean more than averages and run-scoring records. These innings are the true path to greatness, a path that Mohammad Yousuf must tread.