I would be delighted with 4th and reasonably happy with 5th. Not so bothered about the trophy this season, although it would be nice. Put is this way, I'd rather get top 4 (that's top 4 and no lucky team knocking us out before we enter CL) than win the Europa League.
I cut AVB some slack as he has some bad injuries. I also don't believe the signings are necassarily his. But we are hanging on for dear life in every game in which we lead, even against West Ham the final few minutes would have been interesting had they got a 2nd goal. Admittedly, our squad is not the biggest and the subs aren't great, but he seems powerless to stop it, or he doesn't have the tactical nous to do anything about it. Arsenal away is a good example, we could all see that we were falling apart, but he waits until half time to do anything about it, when the game was pretty much over. I had the same criticisms of Redknapp last season during our bad run when he would say "I could see we were struggling/tired." Well do something about it then! Don't wait until we go a goal or two down. His negative style of play when we go ahead plays into the other teams hands as we can't defend. The natural instinct as a defender is to defend deeper and deeper, even though they know they shouldn't. I could see the merit in this if we had a great defense, but we don't, Spurs don't do great defenses.