your ME experience regarding..

jumping and height..

ive read that, in previous fm releases, height wasnt an issue, it was the ability to jump that won you the headers..

if a player is 175 cm tall and has jumping 18, and the other is 190 cm tall and has 15, does height matter or would the ME lean towards the player with higher jumping winning the header..?

I think jumping is all that counts in the ME but height is represented in the jumping ability, ie tall players usually have higher jumping ability than short players. Anyway, the short player would win the header in your example.

I did some tests recently where I duplicated a tall player's attributes but made his clone a really short guy. I then played a number of friendlies (actually, the same match over and over) alternating between the two players. Nothing in the results of the test suggest that height has any bearing whatsoever in the match engine on who wins headers and who doesn't. Which clearly some researchers still don't understand as they still give out insanely high jumping attributes to short players (take a look at Barnsley's Iain Hume for an example of what I mean.)