How cricketer Glenn McGrath is finding purpose through family and McGrath Foundation after love and loss

When Sara Leonardi met cricketer Glenn McGrath at a party in Cape Town in 2009, she had no idea the tall, affable Australian was one of the greatest fast bowlers the game has ever produced. In fact, the Italian American interior designer barely knew what cricket was.

«I remember asking him, 'What do you do?',» she recalls. «And he's like, 'I play cricket.' And I was like, 'No, I mean how do you pay your mortgage?' And he said, 'No, I play cricket'.

»I didn't know anything about cricket, let alone Glenn."

Sara had been living in Cape Town, South Africa, for the previous three years. Glenn, who was nearly 12 years her senior, was there to play cricket. The pair «just hit it off», Glenn recalls.

«I just enjoyed being with her. She's fun, she's exciting. She's got all these ideas and never wants to sit still.»

Within a year of their chance meeting, Sara up-ended her life and moved to Australia to be with Glenn. But she was walking into a potentially daunting situation.

«She was thrown in the deep end,» Glenn recalls. «For her to come out here and come into a family where they lost their mother previously, there was a foundation because of Jane and her experience, took a lot of courage and character.»

«I came without a backup plan,» Sara says. «But Glenn and I knew what we had. And that's all that mattered.»

There are intriguing parallels to the story of how Glenn McGrath came to be with his first wife, Jane. Glenn and Jane met by chance in a Hong Kong bar in 1995. He was playing in a local tournament; she was a British flight attendant on a stopover.

Jane, like Sara, had no interest in cricket and no idea who Glenn was, later recalling how baffled she was when someone said he was as famous as Robert De Niro.

And, similarly, she