Aston Villa manager Paul Lambert has admitted that sorting out Christian Benteke's future last month could have held the key to his side's promising start to the season.

Villa opened the campaign with a 3-1 win at Arsenal last weekend, before coming close to taking another scalp in a 2-1 defeat at Chelsea on Wednesday.

Benteke has scored three times in those two matches, with Lambert conceding that finding a player to replace the Belgian international for anywhere near his £7m fee would prove near impossible.

He told The Mirror: "If you did have other issues off the pitch it can affect you, because then you can look for excuses. You can turn around and say, 'I'm not happy off the pitch'. I've got a team now that are all together, which is great for me. Christian has started the season with three goals in two games, he's playing really well.

"There were a lot of factors going on and we had to get him to think about what was happening. Thankfully we got him to stay. We had to go into the season knowing what everyone was doing. If Christian had left, we'd have had to try to replace him.

"Where do you get another striker for the money, £7m, we paid for him?"

The 22-year-old handed in a transfer request this summer amid rumours of interest from Tottenham Hotspur but changed his mind two weeks later, signing a contract that commits his future to Villa Park until 2017.