PHP variables showing outside <title> tag but not inside

I’m running a news site at casinoupdate.co.uk and as part of it, I’ve written a simple tool which is based on passed variables from an input page (see example page at https://www.casinoupdate.co.uk/country-results/?country=Argentina).

Now Google webmaster is saying that this tool is producing duplicate short titles so I want to add the country variable to the title using …

$country = $_REQUEST['country']

and adding $country to the <title> tag in header.php using a conditional statement based on isset, as in …

if (isset($country)){
	echo $country . ": ";
}

to produce, for example …

<title> Greenland: Gambling is .. | CasinoUpdate.co.uk <title>

but it doesn’t show up!

What makes it more puzzling is that if the statement is placed before the <title> tag it DOES appear.

Can anyone tell me what’s going on?