{"id":191283,"date":"2025-10-10T20:45:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/191283\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T20:45:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:45:10","slug":"matchroom-on-ben-whittaker-plans-and-very-busy-end-to-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/191283\/","title":{"rendered":"Matchroom on Ben Whittaker plans and \u2018very busy end to the year\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;\">\u201cI think Ben always wanted to sign with Matchroom,\u201d added Smith. \u201cWhich makes it a bit easier, in truth, if the desire is there. And I think with Ben, even when you look back to three and a bit years ago, when he turned professional, we were very close to signing him. We had a deal essentially agreed, just not signed. We filmed a promo for it. We&#8217;ve got all of that promotional content. And I think we always knew that when the time came, when he was a free agent, that we would make a big play for him, but as everyone would. So, yeah, I push quite hard. I work with Will Harvey, who manages him and his lawyer as well. It was a big, big bit of work. But it was a team effort.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI think Ben always wanted to sign with Matchroom,\u201d added Smith. \u201cWhich makes it a bit easier, in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[83265,2560,6572,83794,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-191283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-ben-whittaker","9":"tag-boxing","10":"tag-eddie-hearn","11":"tag-frank-smith","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}