Sri Lanka has long been a much more renowned limited overs specialist country than in the longer format, but struggled in the opening one-day international against Australia with the home side amassing 5-305, and then the tourists falling to make just 198 in 40 overs in reply.
Jayawardene was disappointed with some of the bowling from his team, particularly the experienced and talented Lasith Malinga and Ajantha Mendis, but of more immediate concern is a hamstring injury to wicket-keeper batsman Dinesh Chandimal.
The 23-year-old replaced the also injured Prasanna Jayawardene for the Third Test in Sydney, and there he batted well making an outstanding fighting and unbeaten 62 in the second innings.
His glove work was also terrific and was again in Australia's innings on Friday, and then he came in and batted at No. 4 and looked assured making 73 but he hurt his hamstring along the way.
Already with Kumar Sangakkara and Prasanna Jayawardene out injured, that could mean that Sri Lanka is forced to call up the uncapped Kushal Perera for Sunday's second one-day international at the Adelaide Oval.
Mahela Jayawardene has faith that Perera can do the job if needed, but isn’t ready to rule out Chandimal yet.
"Chandi has obviously hurt his hamstring so the physio is assessing him. He could run and it wasn’t that bad, but we just need to monitor and see how he's going to come up, and how bad it is," Jayawardene said.
"Lucky we have another reserve wicket-keeper on tour, but hopefully Chandi is not too bad. Obviously the next match is going to come up pretty soon for us on Sunday and then we've got a break, so we will assess it.
"Kushal is a pretty decent batsman. He has been very consistent in one-day cricket at domestic level and has been part of our A-team for the last couple of years. He's a pretty decent wicket-keeper as well. We knew that when Sanga went down we needed that back up for Chandi so he is a good all-round package for us to have as an extra batsman or a wicket-keeper batsman."
Even though Phil Hughes especially batted well for Australia making 112, Jayawardene was disappointed that his bowlers didn’t put enough pressure on for long enough throughout the 50 overs.
With Malinga going for 1-61 and Mendis 1-62, Sri Lanka's two trump cards were nullified and Jayawardene knows they need to lift to be competitive throughout the rest of the series starting with Adelaide on Sunday.
"He (Hughes) batted really well but it was a pretty decent wicket once you got settled in. We did try a lot of things and put on a little bit of pressure, but at times we lost the plot and didn’t apply pressure enough," Jayawardene said.
"We bowled a lot of four balls from a couple of our bowlers in those middle overs, and that didn’t create enough pressure on their batsmen and they batted really well. It was just one of those days.
"We still should have kept them to about 270 or 280 I thought and chasing down, we had our opportunities and a good partnership to mean we only needed seven and-a-half runs in the last 15 overs.
"That’s pretty chaseable with the field restrictions so we were trying to keep wickets in hand to push through, but those three run outs really pushed us back. I thought at times that we played some good cricket, but we just need to make sure that we make fewer mistakes and try to keep control of certain things that we can control in our own hands."