A THUG who fractured another man’s skull when hitting him with a large tin of soup has been warned to expect a jail sentence.

Alan Nolan has been left with no sense of smell and little sense of taste as a result of the single blow by Matthew Jones.

Mr Nolan had been out in Maidstone on March 16 last year and in the early hours went to get a taxi home at Express Cabs.

Also there was Jones and a friend. Mr Nolan had a disagreement with the friend. Mr Nolan went to leave and was pushed in the back by Jones.

Martin Yale, prosecuting, said shortly afterwards Jones struck the victim on the head with the can of soup.

“He fell to the floor and was rendered unconscious,” he told a jury at Maidstone Crown Court. “He was put in the recovery position. It was discovered the front part of his brain was bruised and bleeding.

“His skull was fractured and there was a cut to the back of his head.”

When arrested, Jones said he had drunk up to nine pints of lager and could remember little because he was “fairly sloshed.”

The 23-year-old labourer, of Ramillies Close, Chatham, denied inflicting grievous bodily harm but was convicted.

John Fitzgerald, defending, applied for bail, telling Judge Philip Statman that Nolan was about to become a father for the first time.

The judge said he would grant bail as an act of mercy to Jones’s girlfriend, a pizza restaurant waitress.

Adjourning sentence until September 18, Judge Statman warned Jones: “You are going to prison. It is up to you to put your house in order.”

He told the jury: “It shows how one blow can have a devastating effect in relation to the injury we have heard about.”

Full story in the print edition of Friday's Medway Messenger