tl;dr - being paid more money than a doctor (including your talent being developed at no cost to you by NZC) to play cricket for NZ is an amazing job, it's barely a 'real' job compared to the absolute drudgery of most jobs and I will think less of any future players who choose to maximise their bank balance over entertaining their community.
So I'm going to be an outlier on this and I'll preface by saying a 33 year old who has broken his back before is a smart and good guy for looking to secure as much as he can before moving onto his next career. Also being away from family sucks, no matter the money, so that's excluded from what I say below. This isn't aimed at Boult but the looming trend and the narrative being laid for it.
IMO if New Zealand international representation becomes secondary to franchise trash, it is a poor reflection on the players. It reflects on you as a person if you choose to represent a cynical, pretend entity that does not matter for all the money rather than your community (who created you as a player) for a lot of money and hoped you would represent them.
I reckon the majority of people who are NZ cricket fans earn between 60-100k NZD a year, a lot of us have much earned less than that in the old days before moving up, some will earn more than 100k now and a lucky few might have started on the higher end.
Sportsmen in general don't understand how fortunate they are to earn six figures basically from the get-go. Kodi Nikorima, a trash tier former Warriors player whose main talent was rushing out of the line and missing tackles, earned more than our Prime Minister for this.
Most jobs are boring, that's why they're jobs. Many people will spend decades doing something that is often perfectly fine at best for a reasonable amount of money and many more will spend decades doing something ****ing lame for less. Professional sportsman is one of the best jobs in the world, if not the best. You get to play a game for a living, you have tons of fans and you earn more money than absolute elite skilled people in the community with extremely important jobs to society. Even better, unlike the people we know we actually need in society NZC paid to train you since you were a teenager. You didn't pay a cent.
So I diverge from the "can't blame the players" narrative. I understand it, but let's call it what it is. Greed. You can't legitimately sit on 200-500k per annum for playing an elaborate game of catch and claim you've been hard done by because professional game players in another country earn more. If New Zealand players start doing this in a New Zealand context, they are entitled man children with no understanding of how the average person lives, and this is understandable because they've never been in that position.
I absolutely would swindle some loser out of millions to bowl half volleys if I could (the KJ move), because my greedy eyes would light up. I freely admit this, but if I was getting paid six figures to be a golden god for NZ then I would not even pretend the NZC money pushed me away. It's the best job in the world ffs. You absolutely can blame the players, and those West Indian guys in particular can get ****ed. I can genuinely say if I got talented overnight at cricket and played for NZ I'd know I've hit the jackpot in life.
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