No, he's not 'invisible until he scored'--not at all, unless you want it to. He done some neat work with Vucinic that night; actually it was the first time we saw Vucinic and Marchisio worked wonderfully together. In fact they two were the biggest threat to Milan's defense but in the end Marchisio scored two goals. And scoring two winning goals is highly influential.
He's just not that kind of player who thinks he must do something brilliant once he has the ball, you just have to accept that he likes to move the ball and lifting the team together with team-mates around him instead of working through it by himself. And it actually suits an attacking like us now because we played possesion football. That makes us facing a lot of opponents who play with 11 men behind ball, which makes attempting passes into space difficult most of the time. The best example of this can be seen in Barca's matches. They don't attempt great passes most of the time but they act and move as a unit and keep the passes simple. As for the tackle, 'visible' tackles doesn't mean everything in defensive play. As a matter of fact he outdone Licht and Barzagli in that department according to whoscores.com, but does that mean Marchisio's better defensively?
Marchisio's situation is kind of unique, that's why appreciations of his game shouldn't be like the usual. That's why when the team isn't performing well, he looks worse (the example of this is the
Roma and
Bologna matches) and when the the team is on fire, he performs really well. That's just the kind of player he is.