Summary
The Winning Try is superb as ever in Episode 9, juggling multiple subplots with excellent character development and compelling drama.
The Winning Try‘s sudden pivot into more serious and compelling drama continues apace in Episode 9, a brilliant hour dense with interlocking subplots and heightening stakes. Some obligatory comedy and charm are obviously present, since they always are, but even that has a meaningful undercurrent of empathy and understanding. It’s the rare show that makes you care about almost everyone in it — except a couple of truly loathsome villains.
Since things pick up where we left them, with Ga-ram returning to his room and discovering Heong-nam inside, it’s easy to imagine that the entire episode is going to revolve around his efforts to recover his stolen medication. But this turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg. As soon as Heong-nam accuses Ga-ram of doping the rugby team, he gets so angry that he socks Heong-nam in the mouth and starts wrestling him in a pile of produce. Before long, both the rugby and aerobics teams have also got involved to defend their coaches, and disciplinary action has to be taken. This involves the coaches being switched and forced to train the other team so they can hopefully understand each other better.
Most of the comedy and silliness of The Winning Try Episode 9 lives here. Ga-ram and Heong-nam conduct their sessions while connected via an earpiece for no reason other than to facilitate some laughs. It takes one seemingly dysfunctional training session for both teams to decide enough is enough and form an alliance to lock Ga-ram and Heong-nam in a utility room, refusing to let them out until they make friends.
This happens surprisingly quickly, helped along by the fact that Ga-ram has a respiratory attack, forcing Heong-nam to give him his medication. That means the cat is out of the bag, and someone else knows about his Myasthenia gravis. Heong-nam is immediately remorseful, and both men are reduced to tears by their exchange. Ga-ram even takes him out for a drink with I-ji and Seok-bong, where he discovers that the reason he left the rugby team for aerobics was not because the coach overlooked him, as he initially suspected, but because Ga-ram told the coach he was injured and to look out for him. That’s a 20-year misunderstanding!
But this also means that Heong-nam is finally onside, which is just as well since there’s obvious disarray in the villain camp. With I-ji having caught Nak-gyun throwing U-jin around, claims of admission fraud are doing the rounds and have to be taken seriously. Seong himself agrees with conducting a full investigation, and privately threatens Nak-gyun to keep his name out of it. This compels Nak-gyun to take more drastic measures, which include going to see U-jin’s deeply awful mother and promising to get her into Daehan Sport University the following year if she pushes for the investigation to be dropped and U-jin to return to training — being coached by her attacker, no less.
This also forces I-ji out of the school. Instead, she decides to take one final run at the Nationals as a player and sequesters herself away to train. However, U-jin’s condition worsens under Nak-gyun’s relentless bullying. She almost falls down the stairs, prompting Ung to carry her and take her to the nurse’s office. She later calls I-ji from the hospital, telling her that she can’t keep her balance due to damage to her ear. Her shooting days might be over.
In response, I-ji goes to Nak-gyun at the driving range and gets on her knees to beg for her job back; she’s willing to abandon her playing career to be reinstated as a coach and protect the players under Nak-gyun’s stewardship, since at this point, he’s behaving like a madman. Nak-gyun milks the moment for all it’s worth, having I-ji remain on her knees and be his ball dispenser, an act of such profound disrespect that even Seong is visibly disgusted by it. Nobody is more upset than Ga-ram, though, who arrives to see this spectacle and goes ballistic, breaking a window and rounding on Nak-gyun with violence in his eyes. This is where The Winning Try Episode 9 ends.
It’s quite a climax, and I haven’t even mentioned everything, including the brewing rivalry between Seong-jun and Ung, rooted in jealousy over U-jin, which causes Seong-jun to overexert during a training session with a pro team and injure his shoulder. That’ll no doubt cause problems later when The Winning Try returns to being about rugby. But there’s a part of me that thinks it could be about anything at all and still produce a brilliant, captivating episode every time.
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