I do hope Dani Behr is as happy with Mark as I am with my pounds 80

Sunday Mirror, Apr 14, 2002 by DENNIS ELLAM

ON the first-class deck of the flight home from Las Vegas they were just two girls having fun...Sarah Bosnich, estranged wife of soccer star Mark, and her best friend Sheryl were sipping champagne and laughing about the holiday that had just ended.

Then former model Sarah, 31, noticed a man sitting nearby - handsome, slightly tanned, with nice eyes, she recalls. And he had obviously noticed her. He was travelling with a group of friends and business contacts he had taken to the Mike Tyson fight.

Six months on and Sarah admits she's serious about Simon Jordan, the mobile phone multi-millionaire who was such a big fan of Crystal Palace soccer team that he bought the club.

Mark, meanwhile, is the latest Premiership footballer photographed on the arm of TV presenter Dani Behr... and has even been looking at houses with her.

But Sarah has moved on from being a footballer's wife to being a football tycoon's girlfriend. And she says: "The coincidence is just too weird. When we first got chatting I didn't know who he was, and he didn't know who I was. When he told me he owned Crystal Palace I thought 'Here we go again'.

"Then he said, 'Do you know anything about football?' and I thought to myself, 'More than you think, mate'. I let him go on and on about soccer and what a fantastic game it was, and I told him I was sort of a fan of Man United. Now we laugh about it.

"On our second date I decided I had better confess. Maybe I had guessed even then that Simon was going to be someone significant.

"And I have no bad thoughts about Mark. I hope that he is as happy as I am," says Sarah.

This is the first time Sarah has been able to bring herself to talk publicly about the new happiness in her life and the sadness that went before it. Friend Sheryl is still at her side, serving champagne again and nodding in agreement.

Sarah's marriage to Bosnich, the talented goalkeeper with a wayward style and a knack of upsetting managers, lasted just 14 months.

The divorce will be completed in the next few weeks. And that will be the end of it, Sarah insists - no looking back, no analysing what went wrong, no searching for who was to blame.

"Once I had gone that was it, I knew I had to draw a line in my life and say, 'That's history, it's time to move on'.

"I think Mark feels the same. I'm not aware of any bitterness on his part. The divorce has been amicable - well, as amicable as these things can be when there's possessions and property to sort out. But we haven't seen each other or even spoken for more than a year.

"Last time we had a meeting, someone spotted us and, of course, speculation started that we were trying to get back together. In fact, we were talking about legal things."

The speculation had been that Sarah was holding out for a sizeable share of the marital home, plus a chunk of Mark's estimated pounds 40,000-a-week salary at Chelsea.

Silence. She makes it clear she won't talk about settlements, even if the lawyers would let her. Sheryl pours her another glass of champagne.

"He's at Chelsea now, is he? Really, I hadn't heard. What if he turned up in goal for Crystal Palace? Well, I think that's a bit unlikely...

"You know, I did try to be a good wife to Mark. I cooked him the right kind of meals, I made a nice home for him. I was happy to give up my career and spend my time keeping our life clean and comfortable. I enjoyed choosing the interiors, matching the decor to the curtains, all that. I guess people must think that because we were only married for 14 months it couldn't have been serious - but it was. I truly imagined I was getting married for keeps. Who can say where it all went wrong? I certainly can't, and neither can Mark, I imagine.

"We just drifted apart. We weren't the same two people any longer. There were no furious rows, but the silences became longer. Definitely, there was no one else. I wasn't seeing anyone, and I'm sure that Mark wasn't. Even when he was away, I never had any suspicions or doubts."

At the time they separated, Sarah was pregnant. It's a painfully difficult memory - she lost the baby soon afterwards, in the third month.

"When I say that I have closed that episode of my life, I mean it - I've not even discussed my pregnancy with my closest friends," she says. "But yes, Mark knew that he was going to be a father and no, I won't say how we felt about it. These things are too personal.

"I don't know if the stress of our separation contributed to what happened. That kind of question is on the other side of the line I've drawn. And who can ever say whether having children would have made a difference to our marriage. That's something we will never know..."

It had been a relationship that sometimes came under strain, even before they married. They had met four years earlier in a nightclub in Birmingham when Mark was on the books of Aston Villa and Sarah was doing promotional work. Cynics might say it sounds like a lustful romance on Footballers' Wives. Sarah says it was true love.

YET when they were engaged, her faith in him was tested by a scandal involving Mark, his team-mate Dwight Yorke and a video that showed them cavorting with four scantily-clad girls.