He (or Marchisio) should have been taken off anyway.
We were playing 4-3-3 and we put lots of balls in their box from our wings (mostly from Pepe's side), but we lacked bodies in their box. The only logical thing to do (everything else was gonna be stuff of an amateur) was to keep the wingers but add an extra attacker.
That could be done by switching from 4-3-3 to 4-4-2 and replacing one of the three CMs with an attacker. Since we were losing, Aquilani, as a more attacking CM, should have been left in the game and, as I said above, the only thing left was Toni to replace one of Melo/Marchisio.