An amateur football team boss left a 24-year-old man lying in the street with a broken jaw and wrist and looking "like a rag doll" after a late night attack.

Robert Edwards, 29, first team manager at Hailey Football Club, near Witney, kicked Nicholas Shayler in the head and body when the pair clashed in the centre of Witney in April.

Yesterday at Oxford Crown Court he was jailed for six months for what Recorder Geoffrey Tattershall described as a "wholly and utterly unjustified" attack.

Brendan Davies, prosecuting, told the court how the incident took place after the men, who had a disagreement, had been drinking in pubs in the town.

They were at opposite ends of a Chinese restaurant and Edwards, of Spring Close, started making obscene gestures to Mr Shayler. When the younger man finished his meal, he walked over to Edwards' table, punched and head-butted him, and left the restaurant.

Minutes later Mr Shayler was waiting for a taxi when Edwards ran up to him and punched him. Mr Shayler fell to the ground and Edwards started kicking him. He was eventually dragged away by friends.

Mr Davies said: "The defendant went home as the aggrieved drifted in and out of consciousness. One witness said the aggrieved looked like a rag doll and she thought he was dead." Mr Shayler suffered a broken wrist and a broken jaw, which surgeons at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital fixed using a metal plate. He also received severe bruising to his head, face and body.

Nicholas Syfret, defending Edwards, said the incident stemmed from a disagreement the men had over Edwards' girlfriend. They have now settled their differences.

He said Edwards admitted he "lost control" after the incident in the restaurant and is now "genuinely remorseful" about his crime.

Passing sentence, Mr Tattershall told Edwards, a self-employed window cleaner and reformed gambler: "You are in very many respects a decent young man, an honest hard-working young man and the letters I have read tell me that very clearly.

"On this particular evening it seems to me that you were to some significant extent provoked in the restaurant, and the fight which it became is one which you did not start.

"But having said that, what happened then is really quite serious and I am driven to conclude that this is so serious that I have to impose a custodial sentence."

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