I mean, being hard to dispossess is never a bad thing. And I’m generally anti-statsmania - but I just think that mentally, they haven’t evolved from the playground. Hazard, for example, could have been a far better player than he was to me. Like, close to Messi almost. My memory of him at Chelsea was just being chased around and being hacked down. Kevin De Bruyne has a totally different mentality in that if he were a sat nav, he would select ‘quickest route to opposition goal’. He’s constantly trying to affect the game as a first instinct.
Grealish has the ability to be whatever he wants. Perhaps at a bigger club with better players around him, his mentality may be different. Bruno Fernandes, for example, has a similar approach to the game as De Bruyne, as does Cristiano Ronaldo, although he was more like Hazard and Zaha in his younger years.
But yea, more than anything else, I think the running commentary of those players is about how they are the ‘most fouled’, and I think they have bought into the narrative too much themselves and see it as some sort of compliment. Zaha is probably the worst culprit of this. He is constantly moaning ‘ref, how many times?’ but when it’s all said and done, he’d typically end a season with 6 goals or whatever. Southgate said similar about Grealish, and pointed out that his numbers are now improving. Hazard’s numbers were boosted by penalties, but I don’t recall him ever scoring a tap-in or a header he had to fight for. His primary concern was being an ‘artist’. He’s an Arsene Wenger player if I’ve ever seen one.