One Telly, Two Hundred People: How the Con Club Became Mirfield's Match Day Living Room

There's a photograph in the committee room that sums up half a century of the Con Club better than any minute book could. It's from July 1966, and it shows roughly two hundred Mirfield folk crammed shoulder to shoulder, all facing the same direction. The direction they're facing is a rented television, about the size of a microwave, balanced on the pool table with a tea towel draped underneath it in case of spillages.

England were playing West Germany in the World Cup final, and Mirfield Con Club had become, for one afternoon, the biggest living room in the town.

The Rented Telly Years

Back then, not every household had a set. Dennis, who joined the club in 1961 and still sits in the same seat by the window, remembers the committee taking a vote on whether to hire one at all.

"It cost about a tenner for the weekend, which was serious money," he told us. "There were complaints, obviously. There's always complaints. But by the time Hurst hit that third goal, the same blokes who'd grumbled were up on the chairs."

The club didn't own its own colour television until the early seventies, and even then it lived a nomadic life — wheeled out from the store cupboard on cup days, pushed back into obscurity for the darts and the bingo. Members recall the aerial being a matter of constant negotiation with the roof, and at least one memorable occasion when the signal died mid-match and the bar steward relayed the score from a portable radio he'd smuggled behind the optics.

When the Function Room Became the Stadium

By the eighties and nineties, the big screen setup had evolved. A projector, a proper screen, and a function room that could hold the overflow when the lounge filled up. It meant cup finals stopped being something you watched and became something you attended.

Margaret, a member since 1987, describes FA Cup final day as "practically a bank holiday". "You'd get there at half eleven to get a seat. The men who never spoke to each other all week would be arguing about line-ups by noon. And when the goals went in, the noise — you could hear it from Huddersfield Road, I reckon."

Snooker had its place too. The connection between the snooker room and the world championship coverage was something special; members who'd spent all winter losing to each other on the club's own table would gather to watch the Crucible, offering unsolicited tactical advice to professional players they insisted they could beat "on their day".

Match Days Today: Busier Than Ever

Fast forward to now, and the tradition hasn't just survived — it's thrived. The beer garden screens, installed a few years back, mean summer tournaments spill outdoors. When England are playing at a major tournament, the club doesn't so much open as fill up.

What's changed is the atmosphere rather than the ritual. People arrive earlier, stay later, and bring the family. The kitchen does a roaring trade. The raffle pot grows suspiciously large. And somewhere in the crowd, there's always someone pointing at the screen and saying, "I watched the '66 final in this very room," whether or not it's strictly true.

There's something quietly important about it all. Watching sport at home is comfortable, sure — you can pause it, you control the remote, nobody elbows you when you get up for a brew. But it's a smaller thing. Here, a last-minute winner is a whole-room event. Strangers hug. Old arguments about the 1970s team are resurrected with fresh fury. Somebody always spills a pint, and somebody always buys them another.

Come and Join the Crowd

Our match day fixtures are listed on the What's On page, and the big summer tournaments will be on the beer garden screens as usual. Get down early for the good seats — the ones with a view of the telly and the sun. Some things about the Con Club never change, and long may that continue.

Because sixty years on from that rented set on the pool table, the principle remains exactly the same: some matches are better watched together.