De Laet Ready For New Season

The Belgian international enjoyed an impressive first campaign with Nigel Pearson’s men last season, clocking up 48 appearances in total, and is more determined than ever to help City secure promotion back to the top-flight this term.

With the pre-season campaign set to get underway with a trip to Leamington on Friday, the big Championship kick-off on 3 August is edging ever closer and for De Laet it can’t come soon enough.

“I can’t wait,” De Laet told at an exclusive signing session to launch the new kit. “We’ll get the friendlies out of the way first, they’re all about fitness, and then it’s on to Middlesbrough away where we’ll get the season started.

“It’s nice [the new kit]. It looks good, feels good and it’s different from last season with the gold on it and we’ll look forward to getting out there in it and playing.

“It does give you a boost when you walk out onto the pitch and you see the fans in the blue, even when you walk out for the warm up it gets you fired up and ready for the game.

“We’ll see in the first game against Middlesbrough whether we can get off to a good start, but it’d be great to get the three points and then come back to King Power Stadium and see what happens against Leeds.”

De Laet is optimistic ahead of the new campaign, and revealed that the squad are well ahead of schedule in terms of their fitness thanks to plenty of hard work over the summer.

He added: “Everyone has come back really fit, we’ve done all the testing now and everyone looks really good. The sun is there and it’s good to get a rest but the running has to be done.

“I had a couple of weeks off in the summer where I switched off, but you can’t do that for too long nowadays and I soon started running again.

“Last season we were talking about promotion and we’ve still got the same squad here so this season it has to be the same thing.

“All we can do is do our best, go out there and give 110% and see where the season takes us.”