With the Rams facing relegation back to League One, the 45-year-old has assumed leadership at Pride Park after Paul Warne was fired.
Given that the Lancashire team is vying for a play-off spot this season, the choice to go was unexpected.
Eustace, who played for Derby for the final two years of his career, is also a former player, and it has been said that problems behind the scenes contributed to his departure from Ewood Park.
According to Kennedy, Eustace won’t have gone into the Derby game thinking only about the end of this season.
He feels that rather than concentrating solely on this campaign, the former Blackburn boss has adopted a longer-term perspective on the current state of both clubs.
“He will have taken the Derby job with, I say this carefully because it doesn’t seem to happen in football, but with a long-term vision,” Kennedy told EFL All Access.
He has accepted the position with the caveat that, “God forbid they go down,” “I know there is a long way to go,” and other such conditions, but he would not accept it. It is not that he accepted the position for 14 games [without taking that into consideration].
“So I think he has looked at the long-term impact of where the club are going and I think he has measured that against what Blackburn are, who they are and where can they go and the potential of both teams will be massive in his decision-making.”
Derby is now in 22nd place and one point outside of safety in the Championship table, while Blackburn is in fifth place.
Eustace obviously had no long-term future at Blackburn if he believed he wasn’t receiving enough support there.
While he was there, this season went really well, but if they couldn’t compete financially with their opponents, it would always be hard to maintain that.
Keeping up Derby is going to be a difficult task given how poor they’ve been in recent weeks, but doing so would put him in a good position to build something more sustainable longer-term.
There is no doubt that he will be properly backed in the summer, regardless of what division they’ll be competing in, which will give him a greater peace of mind than at Ewood Park.
