The Young Team is the coming-of-age story of Azzy Williams in Airdrie, just outside (and a million miles from) Glasgow. It’s a heady tale of drink and drugs, friendship and loyalty, sobriety, adrenaline and everyday terror. It’s left me reeling, if I’m honest; it’s brutal and it’s beautiful. Azzy is a total gem of a character, and I miss him already.

The Young Team - Graeme ArmstrongPan MacMillan, 2021 — The Young Team - Graeme Armstrong
Pan MacMillan, 2021

There were so many flashback moments for me in this book. Azzy’s world was never quite my world, but growing up in Maryhill I was young team-adjacent (or at least YMF, the local flavour) and the language and patter of the book just coursed around me like a bucky* flood. The fashions and the schooling were very much of my youth, though, and I winced at memories of ‘social ed’ (PSE), playground rammies, and nascent romances.

What stays with me having read The Young Team is the pretty relentless poverty that so many grow up with. It’s what once again puts the lie to any ideology of “well if they’d just work harder they could ... <insert middle-class ambition here>”. Sure, some like Azzy (and of course Armstrong, the author, too) have character, grit, ability, some family encouragement, and grab whatever opportunity they find - but luck plays a huge part in it still. Far more common are the tales of generations impacted by violence, drugs, knife crime, and interrupted education, creating viscous traps they are unlikely to escape. The sense of societal abandonment is palpable throughout. I’ll try hard not to make this political but I challenge anyone to read this book and still believe that punishment is the optimum way to tackle poverty-driven crime.

Community features heavily in The Young Team, for good and for ill. The lines we draw around postcodes and the loyalties and feuds that creates are replicated across so many areas of life, even if that expresses itself in different ways (school catchments, anyone?). But the way that people show up for each other in this book is something special. During the scene of a funeral for a young friend, this excerpt stopped me in my tracks with its raw emotion: