A light-hearted look at tomorrows opponents Birmingham.

Birmingham visit Gods City on Saturday and despite what the metropolitan Mancunia would wish for you to believe, Birmingham still rightfully holds the mantle of Britain's Second City.

The 18th century saw Birmingham rise from middling market-town to one of the worlds manufacturing superpowers. Amongst many of the wonderful things to emerge from the city have been cars and chocolate. Alas nowadays just 10% of its inhabitants are employed in manufacturing.

The superb Jaguar XJ is manufactured at the Castle Bromwich plant towards the north of the city, however Longbridge south of the city centre was once the home of the nationalised car giant British Leyland. In 1973 the Austin Allegro rolled off the Longbridge production line. Despite selling nearly 700,000 Allegro's, like many things in the 1970's it suffered from severe image problems when some BL employees were misquoted in What Car? about a non-existent rust problem.

Car manufacturing still exists at Longbridge but in a much lesser form. A short drive away from Longbridge is Bournville home of Cadbury's since 1893. Bournville was a visionary model village, created by George and Richard Cadbury who moved their fathers chocolate manufacturing business from Bridge Street in the City Centre. As well as expanding their manufacturing capacity, the Cadbury's had the welfare of their workers at heart as the village was built to alleviate appalling slum like conditions workers would find themselves in. As well as better housing, the Cadbury's encouraged their employees to partake in leisure activities and several parks were incorporated into Bournville's planning. As Quakers, the Cadbury's also had a dim view of the demon drink, so often the scourge of the Victorian working classes and as a result a pub has never been built in Bournville.

In 1969 Cadbury's did merge with Schweppes, the drinks manufacturer however as they only produced soft drinks there appeared to be no compromise of Cadbury's strict temperance beliefs. Cadbury's is now owned by Mondelez International Incorp following the splitting of Kraft Foods, who acquired Cadbury's in 2010.

If all this talk of food is leaving you hungry and you need something more substantial than a Flake bar, then Birmingham is home to "the balti triangle". Spanning Sparkhill, Sparkbrook and Balsall Heath, it is believed to be the birthplace of the balti curry. Balti basically means bucket, in reality it is a small wok type steel dish from where the curry is cooked and served tradionally with a giant naan bread to scoop it out.

If a good curry is music to your ears then Birmingham is also the home to the World famous City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. If Classical music isn't your bag, you will probably own up to having the odd guilty pleasure on your iPod by the Electric Light Orchestra. ELO were fronted by Birmingham City fan Jeff Lynne who combined rock, pop and classical overtones to give us memorable if cringeworthy ditties such as "Mr Blue Sky", "Livin Thing" and who could forget "The Diary of Horace Wimp"?

Birmingham also gave us Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Joan Armatrading, The Beat and UB40 amongst many others.

Finally,if they do score another big win at ER tomorrow however unlikely, we can always remind them that Birmingham was the setting for the abysmal "Crossroads" soap opera in the 1970's and 80's, it was revived in the 1990's shortly but for some reason was filmed in Nottingham...how embarrassing!

Photo: Action Images via Reuters