By Grey Whitebloom When Manchester City and Everton first locked horns 48 hours before the last Christmas Day of the 19th century, football was a very different game. There were no penalty areas – referees had to judge on the fly whether an offence had taken place within 12 yards of the goal – and goalkeepers were not a unique breed on the pitch, wearing the same coloured kit as their colleagues with varied rules around handling. The modern iteration of the sport shares few similarities with its predecessor from the Victorian era. As the former City centre-forward Denis Law once said: “The onl…