A promising rugby player has been jailed for selling drugs and brawling in a supermarket after a dramatic fall from grace.

Former Salford City Reds Academy signing Max Capps, 21, tried to eat £850 worth of crack cocaine and heroin in a desperate bid to avoid being arrested for street dealing.

Manchester Crown Court heard he began using cocaine himself after becoming depressed when his dreams of a professional career at the local League side, now known as Salford Red Devils, didn’t come true.

He became in debt to drug dealers, the court heard, and ended up having to deal himself to get out of it.

Capps, of Central Avenue, Salford, has also been jailed for assault following an incident in Tesco where he got into a row with a 22-year-old man over a woman.

Capps insists the victim started it, but it ended with him punching the man to the floor and hitting him with a shopping basket as he lay there.

He was sentenced to 32 months after admitting the assault, plus two charges of possessing class A drugs with intent to supply. The drugs offences dated back to the morning of February 4 last year, when Capps was stopped by police at Gargrave Street, Salford.

Officers were investigating an unconnected cash-in-transit robbery, and stopped Capps because he was wearing similar clothes to the suspect.

During a search Capps dropped a cloth bag to the floor and a scuffle followed in which he was taken to the ground. He tried to ‘eat’ the bag, the court heard, but an officer got it out of his mouth and it was found to contain 12 packages of crack cocaine, worth £170, and five packages of heroin valued at £677 because of its high purity.

A month later – on March 3 - Capps attacked a man near the escalators in Tesco at Pendleton Way, Salford, in what the court heard was a case of ‘excessive self-defence’.

The victim needed treatment at Salford Royal Infirmary for facial lacerations following the ‘sustained and repeated assault’, the court heard.

Paul Hodgkinson, defending Capps, who signed for Salford City Reds Academy in 2013, said: “It’s a very sad state of affairs. This young man had at one stage the world at his feet.

“He was a promising rugby player, he had signed a contract and was due to move onto good things at Salford City Reds, but unfortunately because of circumstances beyond his control it didn’t work out for him. That left an enormous gap in his life.

“At that point he should have chosen a constructive path, but because he sank into a state of depression – all he ever wanted to do was be a rugby player and that was taken away from him – he started to use cocaine. He very quickly became addicted and couldn’t afford the addiction, as a result he spiralled into debt. He had no way of paying back the debt and as a result felt he had no choice. He foolishly agreed to sell drugs on their behalf.”

Mr Hodgkinson said Capps was now working as a mechanic, was ‘clearly a young man with application and dedication’, and ‘was not the obvious person to appear in court for dealing drugs’.

Sentencing, Recorder Andrew McLoughlin told Capps he had played a ‘significant role’ as a street dealer, offering drugs to people with little or no money, feeding a cycle of misery and crime.

“You had a promising career”, the judge added. “To seek to be professional athlete requires some dedication – hopefully on your release from custody you can go back to living a law-abiding life.”