"They aren't afraid to win ugly," said Coleman to the CT. "They've got a lot of quality in their squad - the other night they had something like £12million worth of players sitting on the bench - but above all they are a very hard team to play against.
"They haven't scored many more goals than us but they've got a lot more clean sheets because they don't mind hanging on and then scoring in the last minute if that's what it takes.
"They're not bothered about that, they're not up there feeling guilty about not entertaining for most of the season. They're second in the league and they deserve to be there because they're a winning team.
"That's the thing with us sometimes, we think we have to win and be entertaining. Well, I'll settle for winning; I don 't want the reputation of playing nice football with a team at the wrong end of the league - it's all about points.
"I want a winning team and I believe that the players we've got have the ability to take us quite a few places higher, but to do that we need to be mentally tough.
"We've been a bit more gritty in the last couple of games; we went behind against Derby and Southampton but we never folded, we came back strong.
"I hope we don't go behind against Birmingham but if we do we've got to have that mentality of saying that the game lasts 90 minutes. There will be periods when we're under a lot of pressure and we've got to stand up to that, because we know we can create, we know we can score goals, even against a side like Birmingham.
"They're the sort of team we want to be playing, because that's how you test yourself. We rose to that challenge against Wolves because we were the better team on the day and we should have won. We showed the right attitude at Molineux, we didn't play with fear, and that's what we need at St Andrews.
"It's obviously going to be a tough game against probably the strongest team in the league, but if we get something there we've got the chance to put a run together. It's so tight in this league but as I keep saying, our goal hasn't changed - top half of the table at Christmas."
Birmingham have signed Nicky Hunt from Bolton on loan and the defender will start tonight's game.