The Winning Try episode 4 review: Sabotage, collapse and the weight of defiance

By Episode 4, The Winning Try has stopped pretending it's about rugby. The field is just an excuse, a stage for something deeper to play out. A quiet war of ideologies, rivalries dressed as school policy, and the slow unraveling of a man who dares to coach with kindness.

This is the episode of The Winning Try where sabotage becomes sport, where institutional rot stops being hinted at and starts infecting the very structure of the team. And it’s the episode that reminds us who the real villains are.

Because while Mun Ung fights with a gun in his hand and Ga-ram tells him it’s okay to lose, there are people in power rewriting the rules just to see them both fall, coaches plotting, and administrators smiling through clenched teeth. And somewhere in the middle, Bae I-ji is treated like a disposable footnote by men who fear how much she sees.

The try may have been won, technically. But the collapse in the hallway tells a different story. The Winning Try is getting darker.

Power, pettiness and the snap of sabotage

Some villains want to rule the world. Others just want to destroy a high school rugby team out of spite. The vice-principal in The Winning Try may not have infinity stones, but his obsession with crushing Ga-ram carries the same gravity as Thanos erasing half the universe.

Every step is strategic, every move calculated, and the ultimate goal isn’t balance. It’s humiliation. Not of a system, but of a man who dared to care more about people than medals.

There’s no hiding behind school policy anymore. In Episode 4 of The Winning Try, his schemes become so blatant that even the students start to feel it. Canceling I-ji’s contract out of nowhere, twisting the admission trial mid-event, cheering for the team to fail. It has nothing to do with school politics. This is pure pettiness. And like every good Marvel-level villain, he surrounds himself with lackeys who mirror his worst traits.

Enter the shooting team’s coach, a character so drenched in entitlement that even his voice feels like an insult. His treatment of Bae I-ji is nothing short of disgusting. She’s not his assistant and she's not his intern. She’s a fellow coach with her own credentials, history, and authority. But because she’s a woman, and because she used to date the man he now wants to destroy, he turns her into a glorified secretary. When he praises Seol-hyeon while dismissing I-ji, we see that the sexism isn’t subtle. It’s systemic.

And yet, in true The Winning Try fashion, none of this is loud. The drama doesn’t turn the camera and yell look, misogyny! It simply shows it. In the way I-ji lowers her eyes, in the way her contributions are ignored, and in how her quiet and focused presence stands in contrast to the petty noise of the men around her. Even when her authority is stripped, she’s the one who finds Ga-ram collapsed in the hallway. She’s the one who stays. Because the real strength in The Winning Try doesn’t come from coaches shouting on the sidelines. It comes from the ones who notice when someone’s about to fall.

The Winning Try turns compassion into rebellion

Nobody expected the final round to be fair. When the vice-principal Seong swapped archery for shooting at the last minute, it wasn’t strategy. It was sabotage. And U-jin was never supposed to lose. She was expected to prove a point, to serve her old coach’s hunger for validation. She could have done it easily. Instead, she missed every shot on purpose, not to make a scene but to send a message only those paying attention would understand.

That message carried the same weight as Ga-ram’s voice telling Mun Ung, “It’s okay to lose.” U-jin wasn’t on the rugby team. She didn’t owe Ga-ram anything. Still, his way of coaching had already touched something in her. She had heard him say what no one at Hanyang ever says aloud. That kindness isn’t weakness, and that letting go can be just as powerful as aiming true. That not every battle worth fighting needs a win to matter.

So she chose. She missed her shots on purpose and walked away from the pressure, the expectations, the sick choreography of competition orchestrated by bitter men. Her gesture was quiet, but it cracked the whole system open. The Winning Try didn’t need a game to deliver impact. It just needed a girl with a gun and a coach whose presence spreads like fire.

He’s contagious because he dares to be different.

The weight Ga-ram carries in The Winning Try finally tips

He stays upright through the trial. He holds steady when I-ji’s contract is erased and when the vice-principal Seong reshapes the rules to serve his pride. He waits for the hallway to empty. That’s when the silence folds in, and his body gives out.

We still don’t know the exact cause. It could be the aftermath of the drugs or a consequence of his athletic past. Or maybe it’s the sum of everything he’s endured. The image freezes in time. However, I remember something: miastenia gravis. Do you?

Now, Ga-ram, with his body out of sync, is sliding toward the floor like the walls themselves turned heavy, and it is I-ji who finds him there. Again.

Throughout the fourth episode of The Winning Try, he’s the center of gravity. Training Mun Ung, encouraging U-jin, countering the vice-principal Seong’s games with calm precision. His way of leading strengthens the team from within, but strength like that burns quietly until it breaks through the skin.

This collapse marks a shift, opening the next trial as Ga-ram’s path moves beyond strategy or skill and enters the quiet, brutal terrain of survival.

Ung loses points but gains something heavier

Fencing was never his arena. Shooting belonged to another world. Every step of the trial exposed the gap between brute strength and controlled precision. And still, Mun Ung stepped forward. He absorbed, adjusted, and endured.

Ga-ram could have softened the path. The team could have cleared it for him. But The Winning Try builds its heroes from grit, not shortcuts. Ung’s single point in fencing didn’t arrive through luck. It came through attention, through the way he reads movement and listens to silence.

That’s how he reaches the third trial. That’s how he earns U-jin’s silent respect. He doesn’t steal the spotlight. He earns the right to stay. And in a school that treats athletes like tools to be traded and replaced, that alone already shifts the ground.

Mun Ung doesn’t rise by fate. He becomes necessary through effort.

The Winning Try episode 4 turns games into reckoning

Nobody scored big or crossed a finish line, but every scene carried the weight of a test measured in pressure, defiance, and choice. One student dropped her shots to protect the right of others to play, one coach collapsed when no one was watching, and a team that barely touched the ball still came out stronger.

The Winning Try hides its sharpest truths beneath the illusion of formal trials, but this episode breaks through that surface to reveal where the real battles are fought. The tension doesn’t come from the outcome of a match. Instead, it builds inside systems designed to control the result, and it rises in moments where care interrupts order, where effort resists expectation, and where kindness turns into defiance.

This episode of The Winning Try builds toward nothing the scoreboard can capture and ends in a collapse that says more than any win ever could.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 things getting in the way, and still the try lands. Sometimes the sabotage is part of the score.