A TALENTED teenage footballer whose chance of a potentially glittering professional career was thrown away after he dealt in ecstasy is to use his bitter experience to try and help others stay on the straight and narrow.

Daniel Roberts, 18, from Llandderfel near Bala, is planning to write a book about this fall from grace with his aunt, acclaimed Welsh author Bethan Gwanas, and to make into secondary and primary schools to tell them not to do the same mistakes as him.

Roberts, who was a scholarship apprentice with Wrexham Football Club but lost his place after his arrest, admitted possessing ecstasy with intent to supply on 20 February, and supplying the class A drug, between 6 January and 21 February.

At Mold Crown Court, Judge Rhys Rowlands said that exceptionally he would depart from the sentencing guidelines and gave him a wholly suspended two-year youth custody sentence.

Roberts, of Yr Hen Bost, Llandderfel near Bala, must do 200 hours unpaid work in the community and remain indoors for four months under a 9pm to 6am curfew.

He was fined £500 with £340 costs and ordered to pay a £100 surcharge.

Judge Rowlands said the defendant had been very much a role model in his local community having achieved a lot in his young life.

“But you are certainly not a role model now,” he said.

He would be known as the young man who threw away a great opportunity because of his involvement with drugs.

The judge said that he had heard from his aunt Bethan Evans, known as Bethan Gwanas, and both she and the defendant were prepared to use his story to help others not to go down the same path.

People who dealt in ecstasy almost inevitably were given immediate custody and the judge said that he could have gone to prison for a long time.

But there were rare occasions when the court ought to depart from the guidelines and he considered Roberts to be a young and naive man, which had led him to his present predicament.

Roberts was profoundly sorry, blamed no-one but himself and was prepared to use his fall from grace to warn others of the dangerous drugs. He would share his story with others to try and warn children and other young people “not to go down the path that he has taken,” he explained.