To be fair to Higham, I think he'd gone by this point (97, if not, at the end of the 95 Centenary season, after the Currier debacle), and we had the faceless John Smith in charge.
Higham was superb for our club. He wasn't a sacking chairman (although Johnson stayed too long), and he always backed his coaches with money. Look at his outlays

Boyd
Tamat
Jackson
Gregory (A)
Davidson
Roach
Blake twice
Drummond

Then the Welsh experiment
Bateman
Ellis
Phillips
Jones??
Davies

... then the youth policy of
Penny
Harris
Roper
Wainwright
Hilton
Scuthorpe

Topped with other big signings of Maloney and Maguire

For me, Higham's only booboos were the fore mentioned Currier, and messing round Mackey's contract, after we won our first 8 games and the LCC. We went from top, to battling it out for 8th place, by the time the Premiership came around in April 90.

Simple fact is, Higham was merely a local businessman (as were the majority of professional sports club's chairmen, at the time, even football). Years later, and a lot more money, chairmen have to be super savvy. e.g. Moran.

Ahhh, the WCC of 97 (shudders). I've tried to eradicate that from my memory. Tosh crowds, and our clubs were roundly humiliated.
Locally, Danny Farrar (Penrith's second or even third choice hooker) made himself look like a Superstar, compared to our dross. The only bit of "entertainment" from our games, was the hilarious streaker, making the security staff/coppers look like a bunch of muppets. Pity the streaker was a fella, though.

But, bad luck always turns up again, and was proved with the end of season Test Series v the Ausies. We'll NEVER have a better opportunity to beat them, AND WE BLEW IT. Half (if not more) of their stars were missing, because of the Australian ARL/Super League split. Typical

Yes I remember Danny Farrar in that game being good and then being pleased that we signed him. Sid Domic also played for Penrith that day.

We came up against a few future Wire signings in the WCC. Nikau for Cronulla; Logan and Anthony Swann for Auckland.

The WCC was a disappointment because the English teams weren't competitive enough, but one thing that was good was that because this was an era before there was as much TV (or internet) coverage of the Aussie game, it was like the football World Cup used to be before everyone had Championship Manager. You could turn on a game and see teams and players you didn't know anything about and you'd see some talent emerging that you hadn't heard of. There were teams like Perth Western Reds and Hunter Mariners. I remember seeing Brett Kimmorley play for Hunter and thinking he looked awesome. He'd emerged in the same youth system as the Johns brothers at Newcastle Knights and would have been stuck as an understudy but when the ARL signed up the Knights and SL created Hunter as a rival team in the Newcastle region they signed him and he was a star. Think he played for Aus SL team in that end of season Test series when Toovey and Johns were ineligible for being ARL players.

Andrew Dunemann at NQ Cowboys was another who I remember seeing for the first time there - another young kid who looked superb. It brought home how much of a production line of talent there was in Aus compared to over here.

Also, despite the games not being competitive, it gave a reason for English fans to do a mid-season tour to Aus. I didn't go myself but had a couple of friends and later work colleagues who had done it and had unforgettable experiences doing roadtrips based around watching WCC games.

97
We were god awful.

03 was a great chance as well with the injuries they had and we lost 3-0 all in the last 5-10 minutes

From memory, Higham left late 1998, and Smith followed not very long afterwards.

https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/ne ... -the-fans/

https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/ne ... -the-fans/

Interesting article there.



I remember going to a fans forum one time when Paul Darbyshire was talking about this, around the time we'd set up the scholarship and squadbuilder and that stuff. I think someone had asked why we were successful in the 90s at developing young talent, citing those names above, and he said it was basically a scattergun approach of throwing money in front of parents and lots of kids who were never going to be close to making it took huge cheques from the club.

I had hoped to hear a story about how we once had a great scouting network that dug out Harris and Scully but it sounds like it was just chuck money at enough kids and you might get lucky once or twice.

Well for sure Higham was/is a millionaire. I’ve been out front of his very large house on the hill. During our glamour period of Davis...it wasn’t just Higham, we had a board of punchers and Peter Greenall.
Greenhall sold out his business and stopped his backing pretty soon after.