Pakistan first needs to decide whether it wants to invest in Test cricket or not - for the longest time now they have priortized T20 above tests, with the result that the level of batting/bowling skills has both gone down across formats.
I agree. We focused a lot on T20 cricket, and we are a strong team in that format. In general, we focused more on white-ball cricket, because we were a poor white-ball team at the beginning of the decade. We were still a really good test team up till I'd say 2017, where our decline started. At that point, we were supposed to invest in players and become a force to be reckoned with across all formats, but our focus shifted towards white-ball cricket because of the greed of money, and the fact that we had just won the CT17, giving the board a very probable reason to focus on white-ball cricket.
As a result, no players were being developed in test matches, and teams had already found the faults in our players. As a result, when our players were unable to compete with good intensity, followed by the retirements of Misbah and Younis, leaving two voids in the team which have not been filled till now, the result was a team which was on the verge of collapsing in the test rankings, exactly what happened. With no players introduced and groomed, we rushed to bring in all these random players to fix the test team, and ended up becoming worse because all the pressure went to the openers, Azhar, Asad, and on the fast bowlers.
We were failing as a test team yet doing very well as a white-ball team, and that's where the big divide happened in our cricket. We're a good white-ball team, we can certainly compete with big teams and even win against them. However, the same cannot be said for test matches, where we'll almost lose instantly to big teams. Now, the fact of the matter is that you need good players across all formats to become a good team. That's where we need to put our attention.