Hull look to Dowie for rapid lift-off

New manager can build momentum for relegation battle with win at Portsmouth

Dowie's future at Hull is unclear (PA)

Iain Dowie hopes to be at Hull City beyond the end of the season after being appointed manager of the struggling Premier League club.

The 45-year-old was unveiled yesterday as the successor to Phil Brown, who was sacked on Monday with the side second from bottom of the league.

The former QPR and Crystal Palace manager's last involvement in the game was also a relegation battle, assisting Alan Shearer in his ultimately unsuccessful fight to stop Newcastle dropping to the Championship last season. Dowie has just nine games left to preserve Hull's top-flight status, starting with a visit to Portsmouth on Saturday, but says he is not just in for the short haul. "I'd like to see my future here for the long term," he said. "It's about me producing results."

Chairman Adam Pearson is also hoping that Dowie will remain beyond the current season. "It's a short-term contract with options on both sides," Pearson said. "But it's a very permanent move. I'm expecting Iain to make a difference here, I'm expecting him to keep us in the Premier League and I'm expecting to sit down with him and sort out a full-time contract on 15 May."

Dowie, who will be assisted by Tim Flowers, will take his first training session today and says he is already impressed by what he has seen. "It's a squad that has been put together over a couple of years. There are lots of attributes to it. I think it's getting the best out of them which is important.

"I see a good mixture of experience and energy but also people who care about the club, there is a good core of people who are good pros."

Dowie, who said he wants his side to play attractive football during their fight for survival, insisted he learned valuable lessons from his experience at Newcastle, despite their relegation. "For me, what you learn is it's about cool heads, it's about taking your opportunities when they come, about having a positive outlook," he said. "It's important you can cut it on the training ground. That will come tomorrow afternoon when the lads have had a training session – hopefully they will understand what I am about. It will be an intense session – they'll hopefully enjoy it but it will also be focused on what is a huge game."

While he denied having once made an alleged slur about Hull, Dowie admitted he had previously turned down the City job before Brown took over in 2007 because of the budget on offer. "Me and Adam did have a brief opportunity to work together but Adam as always was very tight with the purse strings then. It didn't quite come off," he added.

While Pearson described his new manager as someone with "great passion, integrity and honesty", he admitted the appointment was a gamble. "It's definitely a gamble," he said. "Everything in football is a risk to some degree but we've won six out of 51. We haven't won away from home for over a year, we've conceded 100 goals in 50 games, we've lost our last four games. If we didn't gamble, all the stats are saying we'd be relegated."